Sint Nicklaas and the volcano.

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On Saturday I will fly to Brussels to be the next day in the fair of Sint Nicklaas. It seems that the volcano ashes are vanishing and the flight will take off, but, who knows? Anyway, I have everything prepared.

This time I have painted small series of some patterns.

This is a variant of the folded pattern named Rainbow Spanish,
a very special pattern because the first thing is to paint bands of colours in the paper that later will be marbled.

A pattern of stones that Ingeborg Borjeson designed in the twenties

and takes her name.

The Zebra pattern, a zigzag with a splashed of two colours on top.

And, again, the Art Nouveau pattern,
but now in a direct version from Paul Kersten,
more or less from the same mentioned time.

I have added more colours to the tree, all the Kersten papers that I know use one,
I have marble papers with two trees, but also with only one,
foreseeing that someone uses the tree for the endleaves
and could make a case with the rest of the paper.

And, also I have done this pattern on the Spanish one.

I very much like double patterns,
and also I have done a series of the same pattern, the git-gel,
that was made once in vertical sense and the second one in horizontal.

I have used the same scale of colours for the two marbles,

but I did the first with a rake and the second one with a stylus,
this way the different size accentuate the contrast of the two perpendicular designs.

It has been some time since I couldn't add an entry to the blog.
Because I am under the influence of the volcano.
All my life turns in these moments around marbling.

In May I am going to deliver: finally!
the completed original of a book on marbling that has taken me three years to write.

I have written the history of this technique, with a good heap of wonderful illustrations
that have been facilitated to me from artists and institutions of the whole world.

But I have wanted that it was also a marbling manual and a pattern guide.
Here goes a pair of samples, in the book will appear 75,
I hope they could be easily understood.

In the stone patterns the fundamental question is the regulation of the ox gall,
that is different from one pattern to another,
that's why I have tried to indicate clearly this in every card.

In the comb patterns, on the other hand, the regulation could be identical,
as the differences from one model to another
are the combs that are used and how they are used.
This is what I indicate in every card together with the basic model from which
the variety is made.

Also I have added eight patterns that I haven't found described till now,
that's why I have allowed myself to baptize them with the name of "Weimann variations",
in honour to the USA artist from whom I knew them,
Christopher Weimann.

Also I have been teaching marbling courses in Madrid, Bilbao and Barcelona.

Here you will be able to see some photos, although in no course I could have done so many as I wanted and even I don’t have any of some of them:

Marbling course 1

Marbling course 2

Not only I have had to prepare the courses, what is a big job,
but also it has been necessary to invent some things to be able to realize them,
for example this drying apparatus by means of bars of curtains and clothes tweezers...

... that holds more firmly as it is growing,
that is detachable and of easy transport,
and that allows to dry thirty three papers in the place of one.

I have mounted three towers like this one, for 200 papers,
because in courses we marble on half a sheet.

Ashes don’t stop going out from the volcano.
But in my case it is an interior one that throws painting and more painting each time.

Because marbling I have turned into a fireman.
I can only deal every day extinguishing the fire, the most immediate compromise that I have.
I live minute by minute, without worries about what I’m going to be when aged.


The ashes from the volcano do not worry me,
nor if the flight will take off or not,
what worries me is another fire,
one that is inside me …

... one that I feed every day.