My Etchings - Mother and Child series.

Creating etchings is a n involved process which I love to do but has no patience for. It involves various stages of preperation from getting the copperplate primed to perfection to knowing how long the plate should be left in the acid bath.

I practically gave it up on account that i hated waiting for the plate to be ready and the messy business of inking and the meticulousness of prpeeration before the print is rolled through the press.Also perhaps because etchings or rpintmaking in general is slowly fading into obsecurity in the Fine Art.

The 'Mother and Child' exhibition was held at the Aoba Gazo Gallery in Sendai, Japan. I did all my printing at the Miyagi Museum of Fine Arts in Sendai. There was a Professor from Colorado who was also a master printmaker when i was doing my works there, cannot remeber his name off my head but he was slightly older than me and was very much a gentleman.

I studied Printmaking while I was a student at the University of Wisconsin, in green Bay and my Instructor was a  Master Printmaker from Sierra Leone, Africa by the name of Clary Nelson Cole. Clary was one of the one hundred Artist chosen by the US Arts Foundation for a Global Tour exhibition.. He was in the who is Who of Artists in America. Clary treated me like his little brother and i enjoyed the company of his Wife Juliet Cole and his many children.

Clary Nelson Cole

"Nelson – Cole was a Nigerian from Lagos State born in Waterloo Sierra Leone. He trained at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and at the University of Illinois, U. S. A. He taught in the same University, and at Wisconsin before he returned to the University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria to occupy a professorial chair in painting. In the 1970’s Nelson – Coles artistic prowess was acknowledged in the United States. He won awards and honourary mention as a fine artist of the Black World. He was first honoured by the State of Texas and made a citizen of Dallas for his selection as one of a dozen artists featured by the Miller Brewing company in the calendar Black Americans in The Arts. Nelson – Cole is the second Nigerian artist to have exhibited at the Museum of Modem Art (MOMA), New York.
As a painter and print-maker, his combination of photographs, etched or photo-sketched with free hand drawing, is not only a remarkable feat but a momentous allusion to modern Nigerian and African art of the future. Even his use of colour in the objectification of his ideas, shows him as a futurist."
Clarry showed me the letters that he received from State of texas honoring him as a citizen of Dallas, it was like he was showing me some scrap papers he was working on, no big deal really.

My chosen technique when it came to printmaking was 'Mono-print' or sometimes called mono-type which I consider the most simple form among the printmaking techniques and being the impatient kind of guy that I am, this techniwue suited me becasue i can hip up prints like a storm. I much prefer spntaneity when creating my pieces and the reason why I chose sketching as my main form of expression. I cannot make long term commiment which involves too much thinking and melodramas, this is the same in life as well as in art.

One of my former rpofessors and mentor, the late Mr. William Prevetti use to chastise me for not being able to bring my works to a fine com-pletion, I have always been the incomplete , unfinished product in life as well as in my creative ability. I get frusterated too easily whe things do not move as fast as I wished  and often enough my product would end up in the wastebasket.  

The Japanese instructors at teh Miyagi Museum of Fine Arts Open Studio had the same comment to make about my  working style. They tried to slow me down in their own Japanese way. I donated two art books which i got from San Francisco before i left for Japan. One was a gift book from Peter Nagai Rothe , a printmaking book of works done by his mother of horses. The other was a secondhand black and white Photography book by Yousef Karsh the Canadian photgrapher  bought at the Green Apple Book Store on Clements?Street in San Francisco. Both books were kept as part of the studio library collection and might still be there.

My all time favorite printmaker in art History has to be Albreght Durer, the German Master Printmaker and there is also th guy who illusterade the Devine Comedy by Dante Alleghery, his name if I am not mistaken was Gustave Dore
Paul Gustave Doré (French: [pɔl ɡystav dɔʁe]; January 6, 1832 – January 23, 1883) was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving Thank you Wikipedia.
Doré was born in Strasbourg and his first illustrated story was published at the age of fifteen. His talent was evident even earlier, however. At age five he had been a prodigy troublemaker, playing pranks that were mature beyond his years. Seven years later, he began carving in cement. Subsequently, as a young man, he began work as a literary illustrator in Paris, winning commissions to depict scenes from books by Rabelais, Balzac, Milton and Dante.