 Hi, I'm Joseph Velazquez, I'm from Austin, Texas, and I'm here as Artisan Residence here at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan. Here I am the Artisan Residence for the next few weeks, leading up to the big mid-summer festivals of the arts here in Sheboygan. I'll be accomplishing a few community projects, culminating into our final steam roller block printing. So, right now I have two three-foot by five-foot woodcuts that I've been working with in the community for the last three weeks, and carving along with giving some printmaking demonstrations, wood carving, screen printing demonstrations, and sharing my love and process of printmaking with the community. Can you explain the process you go through? Sure, the woodcut process first just begins with the drawing, and it's understanding that it has to be a black and white drawing. And there are various different types of wood that you can use traditionally. You can have a stronger wood or harder wood if you're going to be printing by hand, and some of the softer materials would be much easier to carve. Go away from wood and you can even use linoleum. I have a preference to use medium-density fiberboard because it's not harsh on my tools. It enables me to give really fast workshops to get people carving right away without it being detrimental to the tools, cuts down on the hazardous opportunity for someone cutting themselves, and can really demystify the process of making it accessible for people who just want to learn. And to me that's been like the largest engagement with woodcut or printmaking as possible, is just making it more accessible to people, because for the most part the arts are very intimidating and can be as a deterrent with a heavy process. And this is heavy process, so it is a deterrent. We have these sharp gouges of the tools that I use that have different heads and of the heads. They make a different mark. So I, during my workshops, I'll have an image that I draw up and I encourage others. I show them how to hold the tool and which tool does what for the line work that you're looking for. The wood makes a big difference. So after I make my drawing on the MDF and I color it black, the next thing I do is I use a water-based acrylic and I coat my block and that gives it this red look over to it. And the reason why I do that is so whenever I begin to carve away, the negative pops up and it's white. And so it's indicative to me that if I roll ink on the surface right now, the ink is only going to go where it's red and black. The ink is not going to go anywhere where I can now see the natural color of the wood. And you see the way that I carve, I'm holding the tool like a pencil. The tool must be upright where the two beveled edges are up. If you tilt the tool a certain way and you can undercut the wood, what happens is you exceed the depth of the wood and you cause what's called a blowout or flooding when it goes over the line and it actually rips the wood and that's not a desired aesthetic. So it's all about maintaining the correct angle of the wood and being able to push it through. You see with my left hand the way I like to carve is my left hand as I refer to it as my articulation hand. My left hand guides the tool where I'm going. Well my right hand you see it's all pushing elbow. I never am sore in my forearm or anything. I'm carving like this. When I need to move, it's not proper to break your wrist and try to carve like that. It doesn't make sense when you should just slightly turn the block. Navigate and negotiate yourself around the block and not to compromise the dexterity of your muscles by doing something and that's what really helps to prevent fatigue. I can carve a block like this in three days. I can carve fast. I can carve with a lot more detail and extreme detail when I take three months to carve on a block. But for me to have that exercise of working with the community and going through the speed, this kind of stuff is fun and it lets my process not be so formulaic into one way of working. I would never do with images of three seahorses crashing through the waves but for this theme of myths and mysteries and a project such as this, this gives me that opportunity to engage in the public and make something fun and not always have to take everything so serious with the heavy-heartedness as an artist and to be able to engage like that. This process of being able to cut this fast, this is something that is super captivating and I think that people who watch it and get involved and start cutting with me too, it's only a matter of time before they get into it and want to give a shot. So I have people get the tools and I teach them to use your left hand to help guide your right hands with the power and you always want to carve away from yourself because in case you slip you want to slip that way and you don't want to slip towards yourself. You want to do unto others before yourself. I read that somewhere and it's important that you do that especially when you're carving. You don't want to cause injury to yourself. And you see at times I'll hit the burp up and then I'll use my hand just to rub over it. You don't need gloves but I like to wear gloves because I wash my hands so much that they dry out so when I'm carving or anything I'll just put the gloves on to help out. You can see the areas that I've done around the areas I sometimes get my smaller tools and I'll guide myself around where I want to carve. So I'm essentially just making myself an outline of where I want the tool to carve. Once I fill out that outline is substantial and it's going to prevent me from carving into my other lines I can then switch tools and I begin to carve and clear out that area just really popping up and establishing the white area that I intend to be white. Now this project that I'm doing here at the Art Center it stems from a larger endeavor that I began over ten years ago while at grad school at UW Madison at Go Badgers. My colleague and I Greg, Nanny and I while in graduate school getting our Masters of Fine Arts in printmaking we proposed a thesis project to our committees there at UW to allow us to mobilize a printing press into the back of our vehicle that would retract and we proposed going to schools across the state and across the Midwest that didn't have visiting artist programs and we wanted to visit the school, give demonstrations, talk about the history of printmaking, share artwork and give a brief lecture on the process all the while pulling up in our press out of the back of our vehicle printing up prints and t-shirts for people and sharing our love and passion of what we do. To our surprise our committee said yes and we hit the road and we went to twenty six different schools throughout the Midwest given our presentation and after our thesis was complete we then got emails from eighty five other universities across the country and then following our graduation Greg and I continue our endeavor drive by press and to date we visited over two hundred and forty five college campuses across the country over a hundred different community art centers just like the John Michael Kohler Art Center and we've amassed over two hundred fifty thousand miles on the road traveling with drive by press and doing so we've also been lucky enough to tour with different indie rock bands and making t-shirts and being able to sell our t-shirts online as vendors at fab.com and a few other different markets and it's been really engaging and it's been really opportunistic for us but it's been a really fun adventure to share our passion of what we've done and how we do things and to me one of the most the greatest things I've gotten from these travels is the people who I meet uh... the people who I meet are from all walks of life they appreciate what I do as an artist that I share with them and then they share their stories with me and oftentimes man I meet these artists they just come out the woodworks and they are simply amazing and they'll share some like uh... trade secrets with me uh... you know and they'll share their artwork with me and that's just something that I can't put a monetary value on that has been something that has been one of the best uh... benefits almost gratifying aspects to the uh... opportunities that I have and traveling the country and sharing this work uh... well I got out of the military I was in the military for four years and I was just taking some uh... English classes and then when I got out of the military I had a scholarship opportunity uh... and uh... as an English major and part of my English major requirement was taken humanities class and print making I went down into the art department and I saw a printmaker pull a print right off the block and it was a process similar to this to where I was walking in to get the professor to sign my ad slip I see him pull a print through the press remove the blanket and then this happens I see him go and he pulls the block up boom from the print and I saw that reflective image coming up there and it just blew my mind and I said what is this and he says this is a printmaking this is a woodcut and I said this is amazing and he asked me he said here do you want this and I said what I can have this and he said yes look I'm gonna make another one and he rolled ink on the surface he put it back on the press he put a new sheet of paper he ran it through and there was something that clicked on my head there was something like I appreciated the aesthetic for what the artist had done but to me there was something captivating and democratic about the accessibility of that artist willing to share the original because I didn't feel like that was a copy everyone that comes off is an original it's not like pressing apple p in a computer every print that comes up is an original there can be thirty originals but it's an original when that artist had that sharing aspect to it to me I was captivated by that democratic accessibility that's something that ended just kept on going with me so after I did that uh... to my parents dissatisfaction I no longer sought after uh... my English degree for law school and I started focusing on the arts and uh... they were very disappointed up until I became successful and then I became a professor myself uh... so now they no longer want me to go to law school are you going to talk about the other pieces that you're going to do? sure I'll talk to you for the community project is like that one of the challenges of working in a community project such as this is the range of the demographic of the attendees and you really have to as the visiting artist design a programming that's accessible for people who are tiny to people who are absolutely full ground so the age of the participants here the range has been totally off the charts and so I have to design programming that would lead to a larger contribution for the end result I wanted the community have part of that but on the same token I wanted them to learn the process and do something so if this wasn't an easy task and one of the things that I did to help familiarize the community with it is by doing an exquisite corpse and so I came up with a few different monsters for my myths and mysteries and I created different sections of the bodies where I did a head I did a torso and then I did a feet and then I can mix them up so I can take off this one is not wearing any uh... super nice sneakers put a snake tail on it take the hammer head out express that one uh... this one pigtails there all this was my favorite this is the one with the uh... the clock around in the fence and so we can mix these up and i show him how we mix them up and then i give them the opportunity to the community by placing blank blocks and then we draw where the everything connects so we know it's gonna fit when we print and so they're able to carve blocks out themselves and have their own part and so if they're smaller people that don't have the dexterity to cut what i generally do is i have them draw and then their parents carve and so it works collaborative like that uh... or if they're able to draw and carve i give them a brief carving demonstration watch along with them and allow them to carve it now everyone's not limited to making one of these they can make their own block uh... but in the time that i've been here there have been about thirty participants who have carved and they decided to carve their own image and we're able to do it within a three-hour period in which we carve and then print uh... so this is the exquisite course and this is what i found that have been really accessible and like meeting the people half way then shortly after we do this after the carving in order to give them the printing demonstration i have some of my blocks that i've carved uh... that i show them how to ink up and i give them the option to print for a few of my cards so at the workshops and they get to take their block home with them along with their prints on how they've mixed up their exquisite corpse and with one of my prints as well so it's a nice little exchange and learning opportunity in a nice ephemeral experience uh... for us all you want to talk about the steam roller process? sure the carving that i'm working on right now there's two of these giant wood cuts that were finished and i have two previous ones that are complete that we're going to be printing uh... this saturday and sunday using a street leveler what we call a steam roller and this is a giant fifty two inch wide drum that's about six tons and we roll over the block of wood and it doesn't like blow up the block of wood the block of wood is solid and we're able to roll ink on the surface we put a bed sheet over it or a piece of paper uh... rubber mat on top and then we drive the steam roller right over it and the pressure of the steam roller transfers the ink from the block straight onto the sheet and we're able to see it i have a few examples uh... put up you can see later and show you what those look like but really to really see the impact of the steam roller you gotta see it because it's not a small piece of metal rolling over it is giant and to be able to have that engagement with the public it's something very performative uh... because they see the block and then when they see the process happening they they're like oh like a giant stamp and well yeah just like a giant stamp uh... but it's also something that the public's never seen before and what it does for young artists being able to watch it it shows them how to expand the limitation of the studio which you might have just a small press and it shows you how that that can't dictate your scale and how there are other ways around it using industry and by thinking outside of the box that you can find other ways uh... to reach the scale and the size of the block that you'd like to carve and print so on next saturday and sunday we have about the objective is have about forty prints pulled on each day we have a variety of bedsheets and colors that we're going to be printing on and we're going to be raffling them off and so there will be some that are for uh... sale but the majority of them is that it's so important to me with this process and my visit that as much as possible is accessible to the community and the public so they are going to be uh... raffled and there will be some prizes and some contests uh... and to win some of them so i'm really looking forward to having this event this weekend but as you see i have a lot of carving to do you put some ink out and so you can see that process i do gotta meet a buddy for lunch at noon i did not i just had a full room i had a mess of information and i finished and it's still there we've got more fabric so we're not going to run out of the dry let's do one more pass and then let's spread it around with the little rollers, make sure you're getting concentrated on the black