Everything is in layers – societies, meanings, complexities, skin even. So, I want to make work in layers and different media and textures.
I decided to draw on tissue paper in ink – a nice black definite line. On the silkscreen monoprints I had depicted mother earth and the church.I wanted to add a third element: Primogeniture.
I thought the church emblem was not that obvious so I drew the ecclesiastic hat, the cross and hands again in ink.
At one point I had all three in a row with an inked over image: mother earth, church and first born son on tissue paper. But I don’t think this works that well. I took all the tissue images down and superimposed them on each other – this was interesting!
Working from this I attacked the print room again drew my mother earth on a large piece of paper, then the church emblems and the first born male on tissue papers. I painted them – earthy colours for my Venus of Willendorf inspiration – yellows and white for the church and fleshy tones for the baby. As I drew the cross I thought of adding blood. Religion has been and still is the cause of considerable bloodshed. Women have been persecuted in the name of religion. (Think the burning of so called ” Witches” who were often merely widows with a bit of money or possessions, (which the Church comfiscated). Think of what happens today to women in Fundamentalist Countries). The blood drips down from the cross and stains the hands. I put some bloody fingerprints on one hand, but these may get lost in the layering. Using the tissue layers as Chine Colle, I stuck them on with spray glue and put them through the roller press – interesting effect – the tissue calms down the acrylic paint – softens it. It also gives the total image some depth – as each image is on a different plane. It has made me think how I want to use more different surfaces: newspaper – perhaps an article about some issue concerning women – silk – rougher fabrics – and tissue drawings perhaps in smaller sections.
When I had stuck on my three sections, I felt the church image was too bright and blatant – using the blood imagery I rolled out some red ink and sprayed white spirit over it . This causes a degree of “bleeding” I blot this with my tissue paper and the effect, ( I hope) is of blood droplets. Now I need to experiment using more textures and fabrics…
