Back to Business

Artist Trading Cards, May 2017 by Phillip Hoyle

Finally after too many weeks with no posts, I'm back in business. I actually did make a few cards for trade but traded all of them and forgot to scan them. Now I'm better organized and hope to make regular postings of some of the cards, leaf prints, and other artwork I conspire to do and complete! 

Abstract designs and monoprints continue to keep my interest. I've been looking at other things too, but don't know when I will feel I know enough about printing to satisfy this current interest. 

Artist Trading Card, May 2017 by Phillip Hoyle

I made four sets of cards but have printed only three of them. Perhaps I'll show more next week--if I happen to remember.

Hope you are warming up in this interesting spring. Here in Denver we fluxuate between snow, rain, hail, and then some days in the 80s. We're courting summer like we're in a hurry. I do like walking around in milder weather. Also my studio is now warmer. I don't have to wear a muffler and my hands don't get so cold.

Christmas Cards Galore

Christmas Cards printed on Gel plate with stincils. Golden Open paint.
Monoprints by Phillip Hoyle 2016

I am so pleased to tell you I got fifty cards done. Then I counted how many I needed and found I could have stopped at thirty or forty! Oh well, I went at it with enthusiasm and kept experimenting with my techniques. 

Each of the cards is different from the others. And they come in two basic ideas. Those above are prints made directly onto the card stock. They have a very modern look. I hope the folk who get them will appreciate what they get!

The other basic design was to print on pages from an old German Lutheran Hymnbook. I used the same gel plate and stincils. I glued the prints onto the card stock. 

Cards with hymn page prints made on gel plates and glued on cards.
Monoprints by Phillip Hoyle, 2016

Then the other jobs: writing the greeting for inside, printing it, gluing the pages into the cards, signing each card, updating the address list, writing the return address on each envelope, and then going through the list hoping to get each address correct and legible. I am so happy to be almost done with the process. 

I made more Artist Trading Cards using the same stincils and suspect you will find some here next Monday. 

Happy Holidays.

Denver, 2016

Christmas Art

Prints made on gel plate on Advent pages from old hymnal
Phillip  Hoyle 2016

Every year I wonder just what artistic things will happen to welcome Christmas. I start imagining, sketching, and gathering possible materials for cards, larger pieces of art, Artist Trading Cards, and other pieces on related themes. So far this year I've made prints on card stock, old pages from a 19th Century German hymnal, monoprints, stincils, collages, and the like for a Christmas card. I've printed on many kinds of paper to see just what will work. I'm already gluing pieces together and writing down some ideas for a general greeting. And, of course, I feel like I am running out of time. 

Monoprint using stincil on gel plate.
Print on envelope.
Phillip Hoyle 2016

But I'm having fun and will begin a new Art Journal featuring holy people. I haven't limited my idea yet and so have no sure aim at ancient or contemporary, a single religious tradition or something eucmenical, people or symbols. But I remind myself that journals do not need to be overly planned. they need to respond to the turns of a day or a week. Journals reflect a journey. They log progress and regress. They express just what is happening at the time. 

Print on freezer paper
Phillip Hoyle 2016

I hope to present you with great variety in the coming weeks. Again, thanks for your responses. The old year flees, the new year approaches. Celebrate both with art and love.

Denver, 2016

Wildflower Art

Wild Beauties by Phillip Hoyle 2016
Mixed media with acrylic monoprint, ink,
color pencil, and acrylic painting. 

My fascination with wildflowers continues alongside my interest in art printing, drawing, color explorations, and mixed media. This week I completed a painting, even to the point of cutting mats and framing it in an old frame. (Somehow framing seems like the final act for me.) The piece portrays some California wildflowers, Colomia Grandiflora, the latest of my interests! I haven’t seen them in person, but I may need to take a trip to California to see their grand variety of wildflowers. No plans have been set. I’m pretty sure I’ll need to do more drawings in Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri before I make that trek.

Anyway I decided to put these beauties on a monoprint I made from my late tape-prints passion. I’m pleased especially with my endurance. My transfer of the design was difficult to see given the texture of the paint of the monoprint, but I persisted until I could see it and filled in the stems and some of the leaves to lead the way. Hope you enjoy this picture that measures 10.5 x 7.25”. I mounted it on a medium blue mat, cut a second mat of bright white, and put it in a simple modern looking dark oak frame.

Denver 2016

Art Journal with No Words

Art Journal by Phillip Hoyle, 2016. A mixed media experiment and
a personal experiment to see if I can produce a book in which I write
no words. So far, so good!

I am pleased that the project to produce an art journal this year is underway. I've made good progress both in making pages and in coming to understand what I am doing. So without words I arrange my pages paying some attention to what appears next to each other. Someone may wonder just how I made my decisions. I'm not sure I can even explain.

Art Journal by Phillip Hoyle 2016. Of course there are words on the old
map I've used, but they're very hard to read and only indicate the part
of the world from which the petroglyph designs have come.

I am making some personal references through the use of a few photographs, for example including one of a snapshot I took when I was a young teen at a powwow, another one of a family member many years ago.


I hope you as a reader of this blog will get as much kick out of my efforts as I am in doing the project.

Art Journal by Phillip Hoyle 2016. I am having a great time with mixed media
interpretations using prints, monoprints, stamps, and a variety of pens. Each
page measures 5x8". 

Parades of Lights

Star on Christmas Card monoprints
Phillip Hoyle, 2015

Just over a week ago I watched the Denver Parade of Lights. So today I’m wondering about art and the Parade. My first experience of such a parade was in Tulsa, OK when I was singing on a float with a group of carolers. I’m not sure it was so much art as it was a friendship obligation. Still the event was festive. I don’t know what the overall artistic and affective result of the float was. I was along simply to sing loudly—the great out-of-doors required it!

This year was my first time to attend the Denver Parade. I was there with a group of friends and enjoyed the overall experience that included a brief tour of the Brown Palace atrium with a jazz trio entertaining, children singing along with Jingle Bells and the like, and the children dancing with one another and parents. Our parade evening was off to a cute and festive start. Outdoors we saw the parade’s approach announced by safety lights spinning from golf carts. I wondered if elves could be driving them. Whoever they were, they were clad with reflective jackets. The marching bands were lighted up in special adaptations to their regular outfits—some very cleverly. I realized the invention of portable battery packs and low-watt bulbs made their glittering, moving display magical. Then there was a group of low riders with blue undercarriage lights and the car bodies each covered with as many tiny lights as were added to the huge chandelier in the Brown’s main lobby. These cars came bouncing down the street. Their presence was the most visually stunning effect of the parade.

We heard several bands play beautifully and artistically accompanied by displays of pompoms and flags and huge snowflakes. My favorite band had the least glamorous uniforms but the most enthusiastic delivery of an enthusiastic musical arrangement. I turned to an old band member, a trumpeter, in our group and exclaimed, “They’re the best band with the best arrangement.” He concurred. The other best band was a group of children playing Kazoos. They were on a wonderfully inventive float with moving parts displaying a rising-up-and-down clock tower and followed by a huge balloon of a red-wrapped holiday package adorned with glittery gold ribbon and bow. The old band guy exclaimed, “I love the Kazoo band.” I concurred.

There were more delights and I slipped into critical mode to figure out how some of these displays were better than others, an artistic decision weighing many visual factors along with the affective result among their viewers, an audience that was much more affected than critical. And there I was among them being carried into the past of memories and a present wonderland of sights and sounds. I was moved by the moving displays that combined inventiveness, engineering, precision, stamina, and so many other factors beyond design considerations. There are many things to think about in a work of art!

Denver, 2015

Star monoprint, Phillip Hoyle 2015

Christmas Stars

Star. Monoprint card by Phillip Hoyle
I titled all fifty cards the same.

I had a preacher friend who dreaded the religious holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, “What can you say that hasn’t already been said over and over again?” he whined with true exasperation. “I’m so tired of it.” I wondered if he wanted to be stellar, but even that would be traditional.

I am not so dramatic as my friend but still have to face a similar dilemma annually for my Christmas card. I don’t hope to be original, but I do hope to create something that is different for me, some experimental technique or design even when using centuries-old symbols that more recently have been overused by Madison Avenue to sell holiday presents.

This year I’m using a roller, a stencil, a stamp, and some pencils. I cut the stencil and the stamp myself and employed a printing process my artist friend Sue taught me during the past year. (I suppose this is the way I keep myself entertained in the studio.) I chose odd combinations of colors to create strange looking stars, perhaps ones that could gain the attention of modern-day magi and lead them through a cultural desert find a most holy and unexpected gift.

The ones shown here I am keeping in my collection so don’t be disappointed when you don’t receive one of them. But to summarize my card project; I made fifty monoprints with stamp and Prismacolor enhancements. Well, something like that.

Happy holidays!

Denver, 2015

These cards I'm keeping for my own collection. The process was great fun.

Cactus Print Finale

Claret Cup Cacti Monoprint by Phillip Hoyle 2015

Finally I got back to the monoprint I've been looking at for several weeks, maybe quite a few weeks. I'm happy that I did after looking at many pictures of the plant. Some of the buds opened into flowers, others are waiting their turn. At least that's how I imagine it. 

Oh, the collage of monoprints I titled Bear Clan did make it into the WOW show at CORE New Art Space and is hanging there for another week. You can see it if you get there soon. The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday. In case you can't make it there I'll give you a glance at one little part of the show. 

Top left framed work 'Bear Clan' by Phillip Hoyle

Bear Clan

Bear Clan by Phillip Hoyle
Collage of monoprints

As I have worked with this image of a bear in the past year, I have always seen it as a spirit image and without thinking much assigned it to the male gender in my mind. When my daughter-in-law saw several of the prints, she saw it as a female bear. My art friend Sue saw it as a bear, not assigning any gender label.

So I wonder how others may see it. If you want to tell me, make a comment! It's a little bit difficult, but select the anonymous category. You may have to type in a code from an illustration. I would like to know. Comment below. I hope to learn something.

Oh, I entered the piece into the WOW open art show at CORE gallery. So now I wonder if its a she-bear, a he-bear, or something else AND I wonder if I'll be jury-ed in! Hope so and further hope you have a good art week. 

Denver, 2015