Thursday 15 September 2011

Final evaluation

I wanted to become a printer and now I feel I have made a start. It has taken me two years to finish the course and looking back to when I started it my life was completely different. I then slipped a disc in my back necessitating two months off work, I was made redundant and had to find a new job, which meant commuting to London again but throughout it all I kept printing.

I felt my initial tutor was unhelpful and only seemed to answer my queeries with one line e mails so I changed tutors and have been very lucky with Niki who takes a lot of trouble reviewing my work and provides comprehensive feeback that I have found invaluable.

Because Printing is technical it has been quite hard teaching myself from the written materials rather than having access to a print studio with a tutor to show me how to do it, this has made me inventive in coming up with solutions and I am very independant as a result. I'd like to compare my work with other peoples work though and maybe I will get a chance at some point. The experience of being in a group would have been a bonus and would've made the course richer. But I have a day job so it's a question of what is possible. I may book myself onto a residential course in some aspect of printing at some point.

I have found it difficult to track down the work of contempory printers other than on the internet although I have managed to get to about three print exhibitions. The work on display always seems to be a bit conventional for my tastes as I definitely like painterly prints and painterly printers have been hard to find. The Bankside Gallery near the Tate has become a favourite gallery and is home to the Painter Print Makers Society. I am the only printmaker in our local art society and I think I need to join a printmakes group if I can find one that will have me.

But the positives far out way the negatives and I am so glad to have been able to find a new way of articulating my creative ideas and one that presents so many fasci nating alternatives and oppportunities to explore.

I am pleased that this course has made me serious about printing. I'm interested to see how my printing influences my watercolours when I start painting again because I have not really done any watercolours for the past two years.

My biggest regret is that I haven't related my work to the work of well know printers and when I do printmaking at the higher level as I progress towards my degree this is something I must address.

I do all my printing in a shed down the garden which has not been ideal and I crave a proper studio with a press and drying racks etc etc. I will now pack up my shed for the winter and contemplate my next move.

Tuesday 13 September 2011

Evaluation of Project 15







The inspiration for this series of four prints came from the German War Cemetery at Langemark and the sculptures of four faceless soldiers who stand vigil on the edge of the plot looking in. I each of my final prints I have tried to capture a different aspect of the original place.
 
In print One I tried to capture the sense of longing for home that the dead will never see again and the restlessness of spirit this caused in me.
 
In print Two I wanted to explore the decorative possibilities of the image. Even sculptures at cemeteries have decorative possibilities.
 
In print Three I wanted to show the hewn and crafted quality of the sculptures and how the act of their creation provides a continuity with the past.
 
In print Four I have hinted at the dark side of a small plot of land in Belgium, containing the bodies of 40,000 men and the sinister 'faceless' quality of the sculptures.
 
I feel my most successful print is Print Three because it largely achieves the objectives I set out with albeit via a less successful prior series of prints. I truly love the fact that you can see how I have stuck two blocks of wood together to make one block that isn't quite square and doesn't quite fit the A3 box it has been put in. I feel a bit like that myself sometimes. I like the way the grain goes in a different direction for each half of the block and the way the surface of the wood has torn where I have gouged accross the grain. I sometimes think there's a craftsman in me trying to get out rather than an artist, perhaps that's why I have been drawn to printing which in some ways is a bit of both.
 
Apart from the quality of carving in Print Three it is quite a clean print with some good technique used to effect. The different printing processes ie. momoprinting with stencils and wood cut relief compliment each other so where there is texture from the mono printing there is solid colour from the relief print which creates a satisfactory balance between lose and solid.
 
The colour scheme works but could be more adventurous as I have used these sorts of colours in other works.
 
I am least happy with Print Two because I have only partially resolved the dilema between texture and form that I wanted to get nearer to solving at the outset. Of the three versions of this print I like the one above best because it has a colour scheme that is at once bright but seems to reflect the vigourous gestural mark making and backdrawing, It is a vigourous print, perhaps at odds with the sombre mood of the original setting which may be another reason why I like it the least.
 
Print One is the most interesting and unexpected with it's simple white on black statement. I don't think I could've taken this any further in any direction. I like the battered and weathered look of the printing contained in the outline of the figures which was something I strived for at the outset. I like battered, worn, weathered things in general; again they speak of the passage of time and provide a link with the past. I find this continuity reassuring.br /> 
I'm afraid to confess that print Four was like going through the motions a bit. I could've been more adventurous with colour and the chine colle and the collagraph but I stuck to the things I knew would work, mainly because I am running out of time to get this course assessed in the November assessment and thereby get back on track.
 
Looking at the series of prints as a whole I think they hang together as a body of work mainly because the underlying design is so simple. Also they are all A3 which helps. Even in Print Four you can see that it is generated from the earlier print so there is a connection.
 
I have used every printing technique covered in the course except multi block releif printing. This was a hard project and I take satisfaction in finishing it.
 

Thursday 1 September 2011

Project 14- Chine Colle



I decided to use the original single colour lino cut I did of Brompton Cemetery earlier in the course as the basis of my chine colle print series. I realised at the outset that the solid block of colour in the background would detract from the effect I wanted to get so I striated it with a lino chisel to get a hatched effect.

I had planned to use copper and gold foil together with some delicate Indian tissue paper with strands of fibre embodied in it. I wanted to get a highly decorative and visually rich effect and yet not lose the compositional strength of the original photo and lino print. I wondered if the tissue paper I was using was too subtle.

I started by mono printing a pale blue on eight sheets of paper using a stencil cut the same size as the lino block. I varied the marks I made so that some went in the same direction as the striations on the lino block and some went in the other direction. I was very much aware of the problems I had had with the background in my original Reduction Method print of the iron shackle where I had used a cross hatched effect for the background and it had been too busy and had failed. I resolved to make the marks more more 'whippy' and random. On some I rollered a flat colour onto the plate without textural mark making. I used three different varieties of cartridge paper and the last of my expensive BFK Rives paper.

For the over print I started by using a bright warm red but as I progressed with the series I greyed it down using blue so the colours changed throughout the series. I had no idea what I was going to do with the foil or bits of paper and I hoped that would become clear as I evolved the series.

I had already worked out from my working drawings that using the copper and gold foil was extraordinary fiddly and difficult to get a satisfying effect with. I found that using ordinary kitchen foil, which was thicker and screwing it up and then unscrewing it was more effective. I also found that the use of distressed kitchen foil became focused on the cross in the foreground and the overprinting of blue/green greys onto it was particularly pleasing.

I used the Indian tissue paper randomly and to no effect and stopped using it in favour of orange tissue paper which gave some really interesting mid tones where it crossed areas of the paper that had not been printed on. I tried to make the application of the orange tissue paper match the shadows but the shapes I had to cut out were so complexed that I simplified the shapes and created an almost abstract effect that broadly corresponded with the shadows. By this time I had used up all my eight prints and yet I felt I was really getting somewhere so I started another series which I initially mono printed as before.

I had run out of expensive paper by this time and resorted to good quality cartridge paper for all of the final series as I could discern no advantage to using expensive paper although I did feel that one of my earlier promising prints had suffered by being printed on cheap thin cartridge paper.

In my second series I wanted to explore the use of the orange tissue paper to support the shadows in the original composition but I also wanted to explore the use of kitchen foil on the nearest cross. Fairly early on I found that the tin foil worked best if it was cut exactly to the shape of the cross rather than as an abstract effect and I began to wonder if my Indian tissue paper might've worked if it had supported a compositional element in the print rather than just being used in an abstract way.

I tried various shapes using the orange tissue paper until I was getting the sort of half and half abstract/figurative effect I was looking for. In the final print I used the tin foil cross, the semi abstract orange tissue paper shadows and also I cut out the exact shape of the furthest cross in Indian tissue paper to see if it worked that way. I peeled the paper away from the block with eager anticipation and revealed probably my most successful print to date.


Appraisal

Half of what I wanted to do I had planned in advance and half evolved as both series went on. This working method allowed me to respond to what arose rather than being bound by preconceptions and I welcomed this freedom.

The brief was to produce a series of four prints incorporating chine colle techniques in different colour schemes, on different papers incorporating metal foil, thin papers and other materials and I have met these requirements.

I wanted to produce prints that were highly decorative and visually rich but which supported the compositional strength of the original lino cut. I think the combination of the silver foil with the light blue ink has the sort of opulent, far eastern feel and richness I was looking for and the overprinting of a darker tone on the nearer cross adds a further dimension that speaks of the intricacy of the original stonemason's work and the the delicate tracery of his carving. There is an overall sense of fine, expensive craftwork in some areas.

The Indian tissue paper in the final print enhances the exotic atmosphere and the suspended fibres add interest upon closer examination without detracting from the compositional strength of the piece as a whole. Where the orange tissue paper has been used to create subtle mid tones it is more abstract but never loses the connection with the shadows and thus works within the figurativeness of the image. However I love the tension between abstract and figurative in this part of the work.

I am pleased with the final print. This is one of the rare occasions on this course when a print or series of prints has met my expectations.