Project 13 - Combination mono and linoprint

Self Appraisal - Having now completed this project I have four contrasting prints on different papers which I have selected from the total of ten printed. My original idea was to take the words from a song 'And every leaf that falls becomes the quiet earth' and produce a poster to illustrate this. The idea came from my visit to the Langemark cemetery for German soldiers killed in World War One which is designed to embody the very germanic idea of death being part of the cycle of life as leaves and bodies fall to the forest floor to feed the growth of new trees and vegetation.

I wanted to use a lose monoprint for the background 'forest' then overlay a series of flat lino prints employing the reduction method to portray falling leaves and soldiers. I succeeded in producing prints that did this and I succeeded in meeting the requirements of the project but as usual I am far from happy with the results:

Print One - This is one of the prints using the reduction method but one of the first I did before I started reducing the sky line with each block. In my notes you will see that I had a lot of trouble with the lettering and had to change my idea from crisp black lettering to a more weathered lettering because the block kept moving if I rollered it too much. The lettering in this print is probably the best of any, the background is a strong orange and the coverage of the ink from the blocks is fairly even and consistent. The balance between the monoprint and lino is cohesive. My big criticism though is the dimpling of the last black lino print which comes from over inking. I found it impossible to get a flat black when printing onto three previous layers of dried ink.

Print Two - This is the best of the reduction lino prints. I applied the orange to the bottom of the mono print using a roller and so the orange of the falling soldiers is a flat colour of even consistency. The top 'tree' section is less bold than the other similar print from this series and whilst the lettering is slightly too faded in appearance it seems to work with the background. The last black printed layer is more consistent but still not completely flat.

Print Three - This is the print with the bright green background with what was supposed to be a diluted gold overprint. The lettering and the green work well and the marks of the mono print have a pleasing 'liquid' feel about them. However the green seems too strong to me and overpowers the gold. There are some interesting textural effects where the monoprint shows through the gold over print.

Print Four - This is my favourite of all four, the green and violet mono print background is quite an edgy combination of colours and the back drawing has given it a very interesting textural effect which works well with the weathered lettering. The dark green overprint whilst not complete in coverage, is flat and un dimpled. The approach to this print was much more spontaneous than the laboured process of continually reducing the block, taking prints and waiting for the ink to dry before doing it again.

I think Print Four has more of the qualities you would expect a combined mono and lino print to have.

This was a difficult project for me, I feel I was probably a little too ambitious in what I wanted to do especially with the lettering which I thought would be so simple. I over complicated the print with the overlaying of four reduced lino blocks. however the images I have produced are thought provoking and attract attention. The best bit for me is the design of the skyline using the negative shapes of leaves in the two reduction prints.

Response to Tutors Notes on Assignment 4

I read my tutor's notes on the collagraph assignment several times because there were several things in them I found thought provoking. The assigment was a difficult one for me because I enjoyed it emmensely but failed to produce any work that looked like 'a proper print'. Nichola mentioned my 'painterly style of printing' and I think that is a good way of describing quite a lot of my work.

Maybe my idea of what 'a proper print' is needs to broaden?

I looked at the work she sugested: 'Fissure' by Karl Weshke and 'Composition' by John Wells, also 'Harbour' by Alexander Mackenzie (all detailed here) and I had a sudden insight into a different kind of printing, maybe abstract or semi abstract, maybe using texture and colour in an expressive and free way and I suddenly felt very excited about using the techniques I have explored to date in such a way.

I am currently doing the combined mono print and lino cut module of Assignment 5 and will then do a Chine colle module but in the final module I am encouraged to explore all the techiniques covered in this course to produce a series of prints. I think this would be a good opportunity to let rip!

The prints Nichola suggested I look at also reminded me of work by Robert Motherwell and Peter Lanyon (detailed here) and I will immerse myself in more of the same as preparation for my final work.

Bunker - Hill 60

And this is the photograph.

Collatype print series - Bunker, Hill 60 (critical appraisal)

I was so enthusiastic about collatype printing that I decided to do another series based on a photograph of a World War One bunker located at 'Hill 60' (because it is 60 metres high) that I had taken whilst on my tour of the battlefields and graveyards'. This man made hill exchanged hands several times during the war and several VC's were awarded as a result of different offensive and defensive actions. In the end the hill won and I can imagine it soaked in the blood of both sides.

What attracted me to it was the symmetry of the white paths around it and the rugged mass of it's structure bullet riddled but defiant. I could imagine the soft flesh of the soldiers breaking and disintegrating as they were thrown against it. The lush surrounding vegetation and the peaceful birdsong also seemed incongruous against the knowledge of it's history and yet those bodies had been subsumed into the very soil that nourished such a verdant location.

I used the same textural surfaces as in my Spencer series but experimented in the way I inked up the blocks. On some I smeared diluted inks of different colours and then partially wiped some off and on others I used a roller. I also tried over printing areas of the bunker with a light blue to create a third colour where they overlapped. I don't think this was successful but it's a valid technique that I will experiment with in the future.

One side of the path around the bunker I did in a blood colour to represent the blood of the soldiers and then the other side of the path I did in yellow mainly to try and lift the picture. Throughout I was keen not to stick rigidly to the tonal values of the original photo and only loosely to stick to the colours, I was more interested in the mass of the bunker, the interlocking path shapes and the sensuous riot of texture in the foliage.

I planned most of it thoroughly apart from the yellow path which might or might not be a failure. The finished series of four prints are all different because I tried applying different inks in different ways with each one. I chose to use cartridge paper because I have found it to be more resilient if rubbed when wet and I wanted a crisp whiteness to reveal the textures.

I don't think the series is outrageously successful although it is very interesting and unlike anything I have ever done before. I hadn't realised texture could be so seductive. I found myself trying different things and peeling back the paper in anticipation of new discoveries each time and thoroughly enjoying the whole process.

I aimed to show the mass of the bunker which I feel I only partially achieved. I aimed to show the interesting geometry of the paths around the bunker which was more successful but still could have been more geometric. I aimed to show the riotous texture of the foliage and in this I feel I was most successful.

I think overall I lacked clarity of objective. I had in mind a sort of Graham Sutherland semi organic, semi geometric abstract and maybe I should have gone more abstract but in the end I tried to do too much and the message is consequently confused; is this a print of a bunker or a textural abstract? Actually there is probably too much texture and it would have been better to contrast some of the textural passages with some lino blocked areas of solid colour.

I felt drawn to collatype throughout this assignment and may well combine it with other techniques in my final series of Assignment Five.'

Stanley Spencer Arrives in Heaven

I still had Cookham, Spencer and the World War One artists in my mind when I was thinking about an image for my collatype print series. It occurred to me that I could take Spencer's painting 'John Donne Arrives in Heaven' and do a version of it with Spencer arriving in heaven to be greeted by angels. The iconic image of Spencer pushing his push chair through Cookham seemed appropriate. I decided to create the angels by drawing them into filler and printing them in intaglio but in a vague dream like way. By accident some of my test prints using carborundum on plywood had created some interesting contrasts between the texture of the plywood and the the texture of the carborundum and I could sort of imagine the exposed plywood being a slightly comic little man. I experimented with these combinations and evolved a stencil shape to represent Spencer. I printed the angels first on soaked Somerset paper in a landscape format and did about five. I chose a gold brown colour using burned Sienna and some yellow Occaldo oil based inks. I wiped the ridges of the block and pushed the paper down into the troughs with my fingers on the back of the paper. I was quite pleased with the effect and let them dry.

I cut out my stencil from cartridge paper and placed it on my ply wood and then covered the whole with PVA, sprinkled carborundum on it and removed the stencil. When it was dry I covered it with blue ink diluted with oil using an old hog hair brush. I added more colour to make the ink slightly violet as the series progressed. Finally I back drew the wheels of the pushchair with a blunt pencil and on one even experimented with back drawing around the stencil image, this was a complete failure but has an attraction and I will use it as a technique at some point in the future.

I didn't like the finished image. The comic image of Spencer didn't say 'Spencer' and it didn't work in landscape. Also I began to think the whole idea wouldn't work because it was all too vague.

I had a rethink and decided to use a tracing of Spencer pushing his pushchair that I had on a postcard I bought whilst in Cookham. I cut a small paper easel which would appear white on the finished print. I made a block out of cardboard and placed the stencil of Spencer on it then covered the whole with PVA and sprinkled carborundum all over it then removed the stencil. When it was dry I inked up the block using oil based ink diluted with vegetable oil as I had run out of Linseed oil and then placed the easel stencil onto the inked block. I had run out of Somerset paper and so I used tinted Ingres pastel paper soaked with a water spray and left between bits of blotting paper weighted down for about five minutes. I used the same colours as before and the same method and block for the angels but this time done portrait.

This image worked better and I achieved a measure of success I believe, there is a ghostly feeling to the image of Spencer and where the vagueness of the angels is matched with the vagueness of Spencer the prints achieve a certain cohesiveness. The warm angels on buff tinted paper contrast the cold blue/violet image of spencer.

Descriptive statement of Collatype boards

The A3 plywood board had 16 different items stuck to it but I found that only about three of them appealed to me: the filler, the bubble wrap and the screwed up water colour paper coated with PVA. I subsequently tried another board with filler drawn into it with a palette knife and with wire wool coated with PVA. The wire wool definitely had potential.

My tutor mentioned using carborundum powder and I researched this on the internet and bought some coarse grained and fine grained and experimented with this sprinkled onto PVA and mixed with PVA and applied with a knife. I did several test prints using carborundum and really enjoyed the subtlety of the effects I got, it has so much potential.

To summarise, the different surfaces I decided to use were:

1. Screwed up water colour coated with PVA
2. Wire wool coated with PVA
3. Filler drawn into with any sharp object like a nail
4. Carborundum, sprinkled onto PVA or mixed with it and applied with a knife

I also experimented with using stencils to block out carborundum leaving the texture of the plywood block exposed. Around the edges of the stencils there was a ghostly white line where the paper accommodated the slightly raised surface of the paper stencil.

The different textures from the above surfaces ranged from tiny dimples with carborundum to highly complexed ridged textures from wire wool. There were also subtle differences between filler drawn into and PVA/carborundum mix spread and drawn into. The filler had harder edges as it dried quicker. The screwed up watercolour paper gave the texture of damaged concrete.

I found the textures I created to be highly tactile and seductive and I wanted to go on experimenting with combinations and applications and stencils cut and torn. This method of printing has enormous potential and I don't feel I will exhaust it in this course.

A Crisis of Brilliance

The title of this post is not a reference to myself (!) but the title of a book by David Boyd Haycock about five artists who were fellow students at The Slade before the first war and how the events of the war shaped their work and lives. I read it shortly after returning from France and found it enhanced my understanding of the artistic milieux of that time considerably.

The five artists were, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington.

I knew quite a bit about Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash whose work has always interested me but the others were unknown to me. The most interesting thing was how much they all corresponded with each other. I wondered at the impact of the first showings in England of the Post Impressionist work on our Art establishment. It seemed like the five young artists were all cautiously deciding how to respond to these new French ideas and were very conscious of working out whether they were valid or not. There were other art movements, such as the Italian Futurists trying to seduce them from the true path of English art; whatever that was they were all unknowingly defining it.

The book portrayed a country with the masses seeking a greater voice in the wake of industrialisation but the Establishment nevertheless holding onto power to the extent that young men flocked to the call of the recruiting sergeants in their thousands. The acceptance of things as they were meant that new ideas were seen as a threat and this was the same in Art.

The five artists were the brightest talents of their generation, 'Les Jeunnes' as they were dubbed and the war changed them all. Even Stanley Spencer felt that his best paintings had been done before 1914, others like Nevinson did their best work as a war artist whilst Nash's war work was only occasionally equalled after the war.

There is a lovely excerpt from Spencer's letters about him sitting in a trench waiting to go over the top with the painting 'Swan Upping' sitting in his bedroom at home unfinished and him speculating as to how the NCO would respond to his plea to be excused from duty on account of a painting that needed finishing back home.

I revisited Spencers paintings and admired the draughtsmanship which whilst naive is incredibly precise and felt a need to strengthen my own drawing skills. I will do a drawing module after this print module.

Drawn by Spencer's work and with some time available on a bank holiday due to my collatype blocks being still wet with PVA, I took the opportunity to visit Cookham. I wandered round the village and went into the Stanley Spencer museum which had a lot of his drawings from the Clyde shipyards which were incredibly valuable and informative to look at. I spoke to the elderly lady on the desk who had known one of his daughters and I noted the name of his older brother Sydney on the village war memorial.

And as I paused outside his old house my mind went back to the graveyards in Belgium and France and I wondered at a world that existed without the knowledge of so much death.