I have finally finished the retrospective posters for the “Battle for Eigg: part 1” (see attached). This is just one of about eight different colour variants as a reduction print with Linoleum. It depicts the play in Grulin last Septmeber but has taken on the mythological status of a battle in the skies above the island. I am not as pleased with them as I had hoped I would be. The layout is nice and the images are okay, but with so little of the detail coming through I doubt they will ever see the light of day or be exhibited…I had originally wanted to create posters that referenced a combination of three styles:
-Those old paintings which contrive an event such as a battle or a massacre.
-Fly posters that are poorly printed and get pasted up all over cities.
-And lastly, a hand crafted political print, where the maker did not see the event or has contrived it for emphasis.
I suppose that it ticks all these boxes, but is still not that interesting an image in it’s own right…don’t you hate it when something like that happens? You spend months on something and it is not quite right at the end of all that investment and hard work!
Two weeks to the residency now and I’m getting a bit nervous. It’s been so long coming that I have already done it a hundred times in my head, and I’m not sure I can live up to that. The best way to do such things of course is to go and create something new again, and leave all the preconceptions at the pier. But easier said than done.
I’m making the shadow puppets myself now as I said in my last post. I have found a way of stencil spraying them onto transparent material and then cutting around the outline with a bandsaw. It looks great, just like the designs I posted last time. Hopefully they will survive and be nice enough objects to exhibit afterwards in their own right.
