Final Prints

After my previous experiences I learned that using stencils to repeat the geometric pattern to get a layered effect was really impractical. This was because each time you finished printing, the stencil would break and I had to either use or make another stencil to add a new layer. So, to overcome this problem, I created a new stencil using black paper so I could transfer it onto a screen. This was a much more practical option and in hindsight I regret not thinking of doing it in the first place. This now meant I could print as many layers and use as many colours as I pleased without affecting the quality or the consistency of the prints.

I started with one layer and used very vibrant colours, that when printed onto white paper, really stood out and created an interesting and fresh effect. I had problems with the consistency of the ink and as the design took up the whole screen wiping the ink across had to be done in two separate strokes and in some cases this created either a gap down the middle or too much ink sinking through. Although that was something practice and technique would stop and I did eventually get the hang of it.

 Although the first set of prints worked really well I thought I would go out on a limb and try and work other colours and different layers over the top. It was a challenge to pick colours as I had already used such vibrant colours and additionally, working out how to layer it proved a challenge too. One more option I had to analyse was whether the pieces would work better as a more simplistic design or if the added layers would make a more interesting effect.

 Some prints were more effective than others, not only in the way the ink was applied but because of the colours I had used.

The top two worked very well as I tried to create an effect that was incredibly loud and disruptive. Although the irony being how ordered each shape actually is and also where the colours were applied was very strategic and organised. The print below the two previously mentioned prints also worked really well too because the vibrancy of the primary colours I used worked well in contrast to the luminous green I had included in the first layer.

Another effect that ended up being really interesting; although it was completely random, was how the inks still mixed and a nice shade of green was created from the layering of the blue and yellow layers. As the inks were placed in an order, the unplanned appearance of the green created even more new shapes when it was layered.

The final print was my least favorite and I also feel it didn't have the same visual stregnth of the previous three, despite the print actually having some nice effects in it such as the contrast between yellow and black. Moreover, the ink had started to dry on the screen by this point therefore creating the patchiness. As this was not the intended effect I pushed this print aside.

After these prints I thought back to the success I had printing on plastics, so I used this same layering technique on a sheet on plastic and then after that I layered translucent plastics over the top ready for the second layer.

This print didn't work as well as I'd hoped however it still had some very interesting components within it. Firstly just with the contrast of materials and the way the ink settled in a different way with each plastic, which left some fantastic textures. Texture is something that really attracted me to continue working in print as you can get such a clean cut line quality with a unique thickness.

One more effect that is quite subtle is the relationship between the underlying shapes and the ones on the top of the plastics. There is a different visual quality in comparison to the prints that had just been layered on top of one another. In this print, where one set of shapes start to become more defined than the ones in the background, it starts to create quite an intriguing effect. Despite the positives I took out of this piece, I chose against both taking this piece further and the techniques used to create it. If I had an extra month, I would've taken this idea a lot further than where it was left, for this reason I was disappointed that I didn't come round to experimenting more with print earlier on.

After this idea had ran its course I had a good few prints, so against my better judgement I tried a third layer just to see what happened.

Initially I thought this piece would turn out looking too busy and like an incredibly confusing, geometric spider web; which is exactly what it did turn out like. I did like the amount of colours that ended up mixing and clashing and there are sections where intricate shapes have been formed in the combination of layers but I still felt although it is still an interesting piece, three layers was just too much and over worked. In some cases this overwhelming chaotic style of work can have an incredibly positive effect, for example in Diana Cooper's work. In a lot of her work, she creates even more of an explosive effect by moving her work into three dimensions. This is something I never got around to trying despite my good intentions after looking at Jessica Stockholder's work.

Heliotropic eye - Diana Cooper

At this point I was starting to look at creating a final piece and I started experimenting with composition ideas.

First I thought about cutting out negative shapes created by the layering and I first tested this by laying the individual stencil over the top. This would have created a wonderfully interesting bit of work, however it was taking so long to prepare and the result wasn't as professional as I'd intended.

Because of this, I looked back to previous works and after looking at Marca Marce's piece, 'Flowing 1', I realised that the majority of my strongest pieces had involved either working with wood or on top of wood in some way. So I chose a piece where the wood grain was particularly interesting and cut it down to the precise size of the screen, so that as a piece this would work on its own when placed on a wall.

 
Unfortunately as this has been photographed, the subtle relationships and effects are partially lost. This has to be one of my favorite pieces I have made since studying on the foundation course. I feel the colour scheme works incredibly well and as it has been printed on wood, in such a precise way, it holds the sense of permanency that I have been trying to gain in a piece. Although, there is a downfall with this print in comparison to the others. The downfall being that as I printed onto wood, the freshness and some of the vibrancy/saturation was lost. Whether this is because the wood absorbed the ink or if it is because the wood is a duller surface, which holds a lot of the colour back, I am unsure. However, because of this, there is going to have to be a lot of thought into which piece I should present at the exhibition.

After everything, working in print has been an incredibly rewarding experience and the huge variety of contrasts, textures and colours I have come across, to me, could not describe the characteristics of a conversation in a much more sound yet garish way.

Marta Marce

Marta Marce's work's are full of colour and the combination of shapes she uses in her pieces are incredibly interesting.

'Flowing 1' was one of Marce's pieces that really inspired me. It's not only the shapes and colour that interest me in this piece but how the wood grain relates to the painting. Additionally, the contrast between the qualities of line in the piece is also something that I found compelling. The clean cut lines created by the paint has a strong effect in relation to the unplanned grain of the wood. I also found this piece interesting to look at as a lot of my work has involved using wood in this way most recently, in screen print. This is another thing I m going to experiment more with in future pieces.

Gunther Forg

Although Gunther Forg's work at first looks a world apart from the work I'm producing at the moment, I feel that they relate in a number of ways and to me, components that Forg's work contain, are things that I've been trying to gain in my own work.

His work contains vivid, clashing colours and his mark making is incredibly expressive and is a fantastic conductor of emotion. This form of mark making was something I originally looked at when I was struggling on finding a way to convey conversation. However for my work I found it too much of an obvious way to take my work and from that point on I looked at creating contrasts in my work instead.

Forg's seemingly spontaneous approach to his work, is something I can appreciate as I find that, when a piece has a feel of spontaneity about it, it adds movement and also in most cases, the random look of a piece is just an illusion. In my own work some people would say that it's just a bunch of random shapes although each shape has been strategically placed for full effect.

Mary Heilmann

After researching Andrew Bick I found that one artist that inspired his work was Mary Heilmann. Her work really interested me and my previous pieces have a lot in common with her work as does Bick's work when compared to my more recent work.

Heilmann is also interested in creating conversation through the means of her work but more about the reactions her work creates rather than the contents of her work. Although she held a collaborative exhibition with Jessica Stockholder and in an interview Heilmann put a lot of importance on how they wanted it to be a collaborative show rather than a two person show and this meant the conversation between the two individual's work was vital to flow, to have a feel of fluidity. I also noticed this myself when trying to pick an exhibition space, that it was really important not just where you work was placed on the wall but also who's work was placed around yours.

I liked Heilmanns work as it has a minimalist feel but was still intriguingly vibrant and fresh. Her work is also a good example on how my work could have turned out if I chose against layering, although I think it would've been very difficult to obtain the unique and original feel, Heilmann's work possesses.

Andrew Bick

Andrew Bick has had a strong influence in my work because of his use of geometric shapes and layering, which is something that I've adapted and taken into my own work.

A good example of this is in his piece, 'Variant (Working hard, hardly working)'.  Because of the translucent materials Bick has used, what becomes interesting in this piece is that there aren't just the relationships between the more obvious shapes but also the subtle shapes created from the layering of the shapes and materials. This is something I decided to take into my own work as I found, instead of showing very overt contrasts in my work to represent conversation, showing subtle contrasts gives the pieces more depth, which is something that I found very important especially as I'm working with two dimensional shapes.

Something that differs between this piece and my recent work is that I've still been focused on using very vibrant colours which in some pieces can hurt your eyes to look at because of the strength in saturation. So, even though I've been looking at the subtleties of creating new shapes through layering, I feel in comparison to Bick, I may have gone over the top slightly on my colour choices. I intend to experiment more with these colour choices to find out whether they work in the pieces I make. 

Progression.

It seems that from when I started looking at Rolph's work, one thing I struggled to gain, which Rolph achieved in his work, was the feel of permanency and togetherness his work has. Despite being made up of found objects, materials and shapes. However since then, my work now tips the scales towards being permanent as apposed to being stuck in limbo between being temporary and permanent.

Along with this after looking deeper into the way Rolph uses conversation in his work; especially in his more recent exhibition 'Kissing Balloons in the Jungle', it helped me to understand different concepts to use and experiment with in my own pieces when using geometric shapes and the layering of these shapes. This exploration has also made me gain confidence when it comes to experimentation as I find it easier to determine whether a piece will work or not a lot earlier on; also if a piece does end up not turning out how I'd originally hoped, I find it easier to analyse what went wrong and how I could progress.

Geometric Print

One of the main problems I had was working out a way to connect my print work to everything else that I have done. Although they can both fit under my genre of conversation, they do not correlate very well. 


So, as a result, I started layering prints in interesting ways, which didn’t really work very well so that idea took a back seat. However, then I started creating stencils using geometric shapes which I thought was really successful, so I sarted printing on other materials such as corrugated card and plastics.

This also worked really well, so progressing from this, I decided to make a stecil that would fit over an entire screen and then keep layering them on top of one another. Additionally, I also started to vary the materials that I printed on to from old prints to hard, glossy plastics. I also cut into to the plastic covering that keeps the plastic underneath from scratching and then layered several prints on top which created a very fresh and modern feel and started to shape up as my final piece. 


So in the next week I’ll be creating several more stencils and thinking of new innovative ways to print.

Experimentation

After my previous piece I decided to experiment more with inks and ways to apply them to wood and what other media would either absorb or resist it. This was very enjoyable and I discovered a lot, that at first I hadn’t intended to. 

I started by using the same technique as in my previous piece by layering oil pastels onto a background but as I had started playing around with the idea of using stencils in my print work I combined this with the way I layer geometric shapes by using found packaging as stencils but I tried using spray paint instead of screen printing. I found that combing the spray paint with oil pastels, I could achieve an interesting combination, although the found stencils didn’t work as successfully as I had hoped.

As I didn’t like the finished background, I tried to rescue it by working in soft pastels over the top. This had a positive effect and left an interesting combination of finishes as the soft pastels gave quite a soft, matted effect where as the oil pastels and spray paint gave off a very glossy finish. I found this contrast worked really well so decided to expand on it but left the spray paint out.

From the experimentation on the last piece, I decided to expand on the combination of soft and oil pastels. After collecting up a variety of found wooden shapes, I started creating different backgrounds on each one. Then, I continued my experimentation with inks and the way in which different media and materials react with it. I started pouring ink down each bit of wood and both soft pastels and oil pastels resisted the ink in different ways. 


The oil pastels would make the ink just slip down it and where the ink had settled, it looked as though the ink had started to bubble as it was separated by the oil pastels and once the ink had dried it left a very defined, clean edge. In contrast the soft pastels had not been fixed, so the ink found it difficult to attach onto anything. So the ink just trickled down and left no mark. It was only when I angled the wood so it was almost flat that the inks started to settle. When the ink did settle, unlike the oil pastels where the ink just sat on top the inks, the ink had started to become absorbed by the soft pastels and then seeped into the wood grain which left an equally interesting effect and created a contrast which added a new dynamic aspect and provided another contrast to the many others that are already happening in the other conversations that I am creating. 

Once I had finished coating all the wood, I started layering them and working out which is the most effective in terms of composition. At first I combined all the pieces of wood together but I found that the piece became too busy and I was thinking of creating more of a permanent looking piece but with all the pieces combined it started to look too temporary, so I decided to start over with the composition.

 

After my previous composition being too busy I decided to select the more successful pieces of wood and then experiment with different ways of layering them. The more minimalist composition worked a lot better and created a more permanent feel and held enough contrast to look interesting but not too much that it became overwhelming. Moreover, I felt the contrasts were also a lot clearer and I know that was something that previous pieces may not have had.

As a conversation, this piece contains contrast, depth and expressive, seemingly random and improvised mark making that create a subtle undertone behind the obvious running inks.

When assembling this piece I had one main problem and that was actually fastening the pieces of wood together. This was because as I had coated all of the pieces of wood before sticking them together I had to cover over parts I had coloured with oil and soft pastels, which through this process I discovered not only resist inks but also glue. 


So after several attempts and after removing all the failed pieces of glue, I decided to sand down the parts that I was sticking together and by complete accident, it created a compelling contrast. The parts I had sanded down left the wood stained with subtle changes in colour and this was right next to the still and very vivid/bright combination of oil and soft pastels.

At the end I was left with a variety of pieces of stained wood and the original square piece of wood I had experimented on. So I decided to try and make a composition out of them. 


Once I had stuck the pieces of wood on the background I then worked over it with oil pastels and ink. I felt this piece didn't necessarily work particularly well although as a bi product it was worthwhile making it.

Paint

In previous pieces I had wished I’d used paint or experimented more with it so I decided to use paint on a severed section of a log that I found. 

This was incredibly interesting on its own, as the relationship between the wood grain and the saw marks had created an intriguing effect and when I added paint to it, the paint highlighted this. However, to me, paint felt very static and just didn’t create the effect I was looking for. Although this didn’t end in the way I’d hoped and essentially ruined an already beautiful object, I felt that this was a worthwhile endeavor as it gave me direction for the next piece.

Group Critique: Dip Dab

It was interesting to take the time and analyse each others work because although we know roughly what one another is doing we didn’t know the details behind the piece or ever taken the time to properly look at pieces that we have created. 


I gained some positive feedback about my piece that was really an outcome of playful experimentation. The contrast between qualities of line and vividness of colour was something that standed out in the feedback; along with how the oil pastels resisted the inks. 


In addition, I also gained a new perspective on my work with some feedback such as whether to portray conversation in a more obvious way. I could understand where this comment was coming from, however I feel that the subtle differences and contrasts within a piece is what makes a big overall effect. However, I felt that maybe by making these contrasts a little more obvious it would not be a wasteful thing to experiment with. 


Another aspect of my work that was highlighted was the use of geometric shapes and how they are layered. I intend to expand on this in more depth and look at new ways to layer shapes in interesting and dynamic ways.

Cy Twombly

One artist who was suggested to me to look into was Cy Twombly. I found his vivid and erratic mark making and the way in which he applied the media to his pieces was not dissimilar to my previous piece.

Something else I was intrigued to find out, is that Twombly went through a similar process when it came to experimentation with ready made backgrounds and the way he works back into work to get different effects. However I feel that is as far as the similarities go, because Twombly thinks a lot of his pieces out and creates a number of sketches to plan each piece it didn't relate as much to my work. In my work, at this present moment, I'm a lot more experimental and chance is still an important component. Although when creating my final piece I am unsure chance will hold the same amount of importance and whether like Twombly, my marks will be planned more strategically.

Dip Dab.

After experimenting with different ways of putting wood together in previous wood collages, I thought, instead of creating a made shape using found pieces of wood and then working over the top of what I had made, I should try to change the appearance of each single bit of wood before I assembled them.

I did this by coating each piece of wood with oil pastels as they would resist a lot of substances layered over the top. I then poured inks over each piece of wood and dipped them in any left over ink that fell into a bucket underneath. This created quite an interesting effect as some of the inks created an odd layer over the oil pastels whereas others created a sort of force field around the oil pastel.

In addition, I also used layered cardboard in this piece, which I found helped create a contrast in texture as it absorbed a lot more of the inks in comparison to the wood. I found creating pieces in this way made the piece feel a lot more together and permanent, as though it was a single piece in comparison to where I had worked over already made designs the which made the work look a lot more temporary.

To progress from this, I intend to continue experimenting with layering other media and substances. Along with this I would also like to combine a wider range of materials. This is because, if I used the same pouring and dipping technique, the way the inks affected the work would vary greatly between substances.