• re: Reyna de la noche
    |   by Uji Venkat   

    Victoria, this piece is beautiful. I find a very consistent aesthetic in all of your pieces, especially your linocuts. They are always refined but relaxed. After our conversation about creating beauty out of mistakes, I'm even more drawn to your prints. With carving in linoleum, there is a sense of permanence for every piece you remove; once something has been created, it will forever be a part of every subsequent print. But that is precisely the beauty of creation that we discussed. I loved seeing your process of taking test prints at intermittent stages of carving so you could see the direction your work would take. What interested me most was that this wasn't a preventative measure, in order to elude mistakes, but a reflective one, to create and then strive.

    • |   by Rayo del Soul   

      Hi Uji,

      Thanks for the comment! I love the idea of lino-cuts because there are so many steps to it, like planning and reflecting, as you mentioned. I am not always the best with planning anything, especially in my art. I usually just jump right in and try to figure out how to move forward as I go, but I really appreciate lino-cuts for this reason; they demand that I take my time and think more about what it is that I want! haha I have to be careful because there is always the 'point of no return' when you cut something out of linoleum, so you want to make sure every cut is exactly what you wanted and then be extremely careful with it. The act of cutting into linoleum is a very soothing feeling too. I feel that making lino-cuts gives me more patience, I have to think about what I want, sketch it on the linoleum and theeen cut. I do appreciate though that even when you do this and things 'don't go as planned', sometimes you end up adding more to it with what you take off and creating something even more beautiful than you had imagined. And it is so great to be able to make prints that are exactly the same over and over too! This gives you the chance to then explore with colors and see which complement your creation the best!! Something I also like is having the same print and then being able to personalize it by adding layers/designs to it, making each print even more unique. =)