Printmakers are a gregarious bunch, happy to trade hints, tips, techniques –and prints. Print trading most often takes the form of print exchanges, where you mail in a certain number of copies of a print to a coordinator, let’s say 25 copies, and get back one copy each of prints by 25 different printmakers. Pretty cool.

I’m currently taking part in a very different sort of print exchange: a giant puzzle print. Printmaker (and organizing genius) Maria Arango has cut a giant block of wood into many smaller, shaped pieces of wood, and each participant gets to carve one piece of the puzzle, which will ultimately be reassembled and printed as one giant image. The theme: City of the World.

Every artist gets to choose his or her own image, whatever interpretation of “City” they come up with. I’ve been letting it percolate in the back of my head, and finally, after returning from Spain, have the answer.

There were way too few cats (for my taste) in Spain; perhaps they were smarter than I was and stayed indoors out of the hot sun. But there were two towns where I encountered a lot of cats. The first was Oliva de Plasencia, a small mountain town that trickled down a hillside. There were a lot of empty houses –empty, that is, of humans, but not of cats.

The cats were thin, but not starving. There were bowls of food set out here and there for them. Signs of a crazy cat lady at work!

The second town where I encountered cats was Zamora. I was circumnavigating the old town walls –still intact in most places– when I saw a woman hanging a quilt out on the clothesline. Surrounding her were a dozen cats, walking, grooming, snoozing, wandering in and out of her house.

These encounters helped me realize the universality of The Crazy Cat Lady (and probably the Crazy Cat Gentleman, too). So here is my version –and vision– of the city. First, the carved block.

And, through the magic of scanners and Photoshop, here is what my block will look like when printed.

The whole project won’t be completed until early 2012. I’ll be sure to share the final results when they arrive!

…to the arrival of my etching press. It’s ordered, it’s under construction, and I’m eagerly awaiting word on when it will show up at my house.

Here’s a picture of the press I’m getting. Pretty, isn’t it?

It’s a Whelan press, and the cool thing about it is that rather than having the press bed move back and forth –which is the way most presses work– this press has the pressure mechanism roll across the plate. What this means is that it saves a whole lot of room, which allowed me to buy a larger press than I might otherwise have been able to. I can fit a whole sheet of 20″x30″ paper on this press bed; a far cry from the 8″x12″ I can fit on my current little press.

Now I have to make room in my kitchen, which pretty much means getting rid of the kitchen table and chairs. Who needs formal dining? Not me! Most of the year it’s comfortable enough to eat outside on the patio, and when it’s not, there’s the coffee table upstairs in the living room.

In the meantime, I’m thinking of new print images and techniques. I figured I’d better post a few blog posts now, before the press arrives. After it comes, I may not surface for weeks!