Street Market

This is the main road through a village that our teams always looked forward to seeing as we drove from Port Au Prince to Les Anglais, on the southwest arm of Haiti. I don’t think we ever drove through here when the road wasn’t crowded with people and products.

For this large piece, the blacks and grays, blue sky, tan dirt road, green palm leaves, and rusty tin roof were each printed with a different screen. To make sure I didn’t accidentally disturb the powders from the first few screens, I fired them lightly before screening on the next several colors. After all the screened powders were fired, the remaining colors for people’s clothing, umbrellas, and wares, were added by hand and fired during the piece’s last couple of visits to the kiln.

The “frames” for most of my screen prints are made first, before the images are added, because they are made with sheet glass and need to be fired to a higher temperature than the crushed glass powder for the images, in order to fully melt together. Firing the images to those higher temperatures would make them smooth and glassy, flattening the texture that brings them to life and making them too reflective. I have to be extra careful when working on images with fancy fused frames. If I mess up the image, the frame will also be wasted. (hasn’t happened, yet)