When all else fails try voodoo...and a little wine.

There is a reason why I am accepting all of these formless approaches to this craft of photo-fresco icon regeneration. Since nothing in the normal realm of experimentation can give me control of the results I am resorting to esoteric rationalizations for my methods. Today I breached a new level in conceptualization. While consuming large quantities of wine and working myself up to attempt a mass fresco casting of seven frameless images I decided to share my wine with the plaster. These are my friends, my only friends the images. I dipped my finger in the glass and dropped three drips into the approximate gallon of freshly mixed juice. Physically the wine did not change the color, but in spirit the wine represented the blood of life and a drink for my homies to make them want to appear again. Did it work? Not so much.

I used glass as my flat surface and I was able to look at the images before I pulled them from there monoprint positions. They still seemed like perfect duplications of the originals so I added water to the back side of the plaster to force the images to spread. For some of the images it may have helped and for others it simply made them darker. I am having the most trouble getting a spiritual print of Van Gogh and Frida Khalo. I've made over 10 prints of Van Gogh and nearly 30 of Frida and I don't seem any closer to success than I was at the first one. It may be that I am working from painted portraits and not photographs. It also may be that they have been dead much longer than the other icons I am working with. On a humorous note I have gotten a much more potent image of Ultraman, but Einstein has no essence in the latest print. JD Salinger is anothe bitch to print and I may have to stop here since his face is sullen and non-descript. Still it is hard to drop any character from use until I feel I have drawn into the hardened rock the feeling of their being. It's as though I am beating a drum and calling into the dark.

I don't know what I am asking for but once it arrives I know that I have it. The fragility of the originals is now a part of the process. By the time a get a decent photo of the casting the edges snap and the image crumbles. In this way I don't feel like I am keeping the spirit beyond a reasonable amount of time for their portrait. The original image becomes pieces once I have the portrait and then I can work with it in duplicate and in 2nd generation printing techniques that will never be referenced to their origin. Somehow this comforts me in that I am not capturing and controlling something that I don't understand completely. My place in this is to channel, not to control. My place is to see with castings that which I cannot create by hand. My place is to translate the vague into the obvious.