This is basically my degree show piece, still in the making but you get the jist of how it will look.
These panels will have 10cm gaps between each one and will be mounted on the wall, all will eventually have lace printed over them as well. The 2 in the middle need to be repainted as they dried darker than the others, not entirely sure why but they definitely need to be made lighter.
It’s been a long week of printing, this is just where I got to by the end of the Friday. I think by Wednesday this coming week I will be finished printing. All is going well!
A quick update:
1. I’ve spent the last 2 days printing my panels for my degree show piece. It’s a lengthy process and takes 2 people to set up and print due to the size of the screens I’m using and that they’re being printed onto canvas covered boards meaning the frame is set really high up and you therefore need someone to help hold it down as you pull the printing arm across! It’s really crazy to think that just a year ago I was only printing A3 pieces and now I’ve printed wallpaper, 3m long canvases and now a huge panneled piece! I can definitely see a huge progression in my work and it’s really fun with all the new challenges!
2. I have my degree show space, it is between 2 huge windows, in a really high ceiling room – it’s fantastic! It is exactly where I had envisioned my work right from the outset. I’m really looking forward to our group meeting for that room next week and finding out what other work is going to be displayed in there.
3. I’m going to be running a screen print basics workshop for a school so I’ve been trying out new techniques of printing that I haven’t tried before and managed to dig out some drawing fluid and screen block so I’m messing about with that at the moment. The school I’m going to doesn’t have any chemicals to reclaim screens and quite frankly it would be impractical and a health & safety issue to have such strong chemicals in a school, so I’m hoping that I can come up with some really interesting, creative ways to use drawing fluid, paper stencils and a few other bits and bobs.
4. Lots of photos of my work coming along at the weekend once I’ve photographed the prints nicely.
I have been busy preparing 3 of my drawing screens this week; projecting the drawing up onto the wall to draw up the transparent positive for exposing, retouching the lines on the lightbox and finally getting them onto the screens ready for printing!
I have chosen to only do 3 lace screens & 3 drawing screens to start with to test out the colours and make sure that everything is going smoothly before embarking on the full thing.
Today we had a talk from Simona Dell’agli from ArtQuest on self-promotion and artist’s statements. I have been to 2 of Simona’s talks before and they are always really well informed and packed with useful information for the upcoming artist. I reccommend every art student and new artist to look on ArtQuest and find out all the in’s and out’s of art law and how to promote yoruself professionally as it has been so useful to me and given me an insight into the business side of being an artist.
One of the things she brought up was being a part of a network, a-n magazine being one of these networks. I was able to tell people about my role as a student ambassador and about these blogs as being a great way to document your practice and promote our degree show, and with a free student subscription which is even better! Not many people on my course had heard of the degrees unedited blogs so it was a good chance to tell others about this, hopefully I’ll have a few fellow course mates joining me on here in the next few days.
Yesterday I spent a few hours mixing up colours and trying to choose between shades of grey for my final piece.
My world is looking fairly monochrome after staring at so much grey but I have finally settled on a colour and got everything ready to start printing now! Just need to finish exposing my 18 screens!!
The printing begins next week and is going to take quite a while because not only will it be difficult to store each of the boards somewhere to dry (they’re too big and heavy for the drying racks) but also because for each panel I am using a different screen so I will be spending a lot of time setting up and cleaning down for 1 pull of the print with fingers crossed that it comes out perfectly each time because if it doesn’t it’ll be a quick wipe down and then having to repaint it with primer and wait for it to dry and be sanded down again before I can reprint it.
I’m going to London next week to see the Lucian Freud exhibition which I am looking forward to. I’m going with a friend who is a portrait painter and makes very traditional work; I’m then taking her to an exhibition in Camden to see some completely different work. We’ll be going to The Art of Front exhibition in a pub in Camden, 18 artists have taken a cover of Front magazine (a kind of alternative lads mag) and turned them into 2 colour screen prints which they are selling for the Keep A Breast campaign. Not only is this using the same photos of girls that I have been using but also using screen printing to transform them into a new piece of artwork, it couldn’t be more perfect.
Although I take these photos and turn them into rather stylised drawings, placing them into feminine and feminist contexts whereas these are kept for the male audience in an alternative venue, with the same attitude and audience as targetted for the magazine readers – I think it fits really well with the work I’ve been doing. It will be the first exhibition that I’ve been able to see so directly related to the work I have been doing throughout my last 2 years at uni and will be great as some primary research. I’m really looking forward to seeing it and have managed to get the press release and some extra info sent to me as well.
Today I took a trip to Cambridge to see the Curwen Print Studios. We had a talk about the process of stone and zinc plate lithography from Mary Dalton which was really interesting. We also got to have a look through lots of artist’s work including Paula Rego, Stanley Jones and Rolf Harris’s print from his Rolf on Art tv series.
We’re going to have an induction into stone lithography so that we can learn the process after hearing about it and seeing what you can make today at the studio. We’re going to create a special collection box of all the prints that we make. As we’re only going to do black ink I think I will create a screen printed colour background to print onto with the stone litho. I would also like to try colouring it in by hand maybe with watercolours afterwoards as well just to see the different effects that you can create.
I love learning a new printmaking skill and it was such a good introduction to the process seeing some famous artist’s prints and of all different styles coming from an amazingly skilled technician who creates their multiple edition copies.
