Tag Archives: Daily Evil

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Daily Evil: I is for irritated

I am feeling a bit like this elf: irritated about the rain.

Ok, yeah, I did move to the Pacific Northwest 23 years ago, and I could have moved away. I love the beaches and the mountains here. But when we are having sun once every 10 days or two weeks in the season they call “spring” here, I do get a little irritated at the rain. Yesterday and today the wind is howling too. Whitecaps and I am very happy not to be out in a boat.

This etching is 2.5 by 3 inches, titled Rain Forest, number 5 out of 25, 1985.

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Daily Evil: H is for Hill

I can’t think of anything evil this morning.

This etching is titled Golden Hills, 2nd Edition, 14/20, 1980. The plate is 4 by 5.5 inches, so this is a lot of very delicate work. My mother used dental pics to draw in the tar on the plate. The darker lines are etched deeper in the acid bath. The shadowed hill is tricky, isn’t it? I think that the texture is a fine piece of fabric pressed into the tar and then lifted, to make the pattern so even.

I think these hills are in upstate New York. My maternal grandparents lived in Trumansburg, New York. By 1980 my parents were living in Alexandria, Virginia.

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Daily Evil: E for Ephalump

Oooooo surely it’s evil to make up new words. Or to verb words.

I think that my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, was thinking about Winnie-ther-Pooh’s Heffalumps when she made this. This etching is another small one, 3 by 2.5 inches. She did many tiny fantasy etchings. This is a proof, for me. An artist’s proof is an experimental run, before the final edition. She might change the ink color, or put the tar mixture back on the plate and change it.

I have had this album since I was very little. Winnie-ther-Pooh with a Brooklyn accent, but really really wonderful!

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Daily Evil: B is for Brag

Ooooo, B is for Brag. I can brag about my mother artist AND I got to do work with her. In the 1980s I ask if I can write poems that she will do etchings to illustrate them. She had done a series with a friend when I was a baby. I was jealous and wanted her to illustrate mine.

“Yes, BUT,” she replies, “The poems have to rhyme. I don’t like free verse.”

I laugh, because the man she did etchings and poems with before did all free verse.

This was right after I had finished college and wanted to write, but was certainly rather terrified about submitting anything. My degree was in Zoology and Scandinavian Studies, so I did not exactly have the writing connections.

I sent my mother ten poems, all rhyming. One was written with a finished etching in mind, but she did etchings for the rest. Almost all are about animals.

She had a friend who runs the Lead and Bread Press print 50 of each poem on etching paper and then started running the editions. We had a gallery opening together in the 1980s in Alexandria, Virginia. This did not make me rich but it certainly made me pleased and proud. Bragging rights are mine. The prints and poems are in a book as well, of women sibling artists. We got in even though we were mother-daughter rather than siblings.