Reflection
on the past week, 3rd April 2017
Psychogeography
It was good to meet up once
more with Zoë and Lynne to talk further about the planned walking event. It’s
now scheduled for June 1st, 5-7pm. We’ll do a short walk and take some rubbings
and drawings of our environment, then collage these and anything else we find
back at “base”. I took along a few rubbings I’d done around the area and both
Zoë and Lynne thought they were fine. I’m really looking forward to this event
and I just hope it doesn’t rain! It’s such a pleasure to chat with these two
people I’ve only recently met and who share some of my quirky interests! More
on this when I have more details.
Printing
As usual the print room isn’t freely
available when I am, but I manged to get in on Thursday afternoon and spent
most of the time printing the small copper plate from last week on various
papers. At the moment the Canaletto paper seems to give the best results. I did
try some Somerset paper too, but I think I left it to soak for too long and I
wasn’t as happy as I’d hoped with the results.
I’m also experimenting with how
much to polish the plate. I’m forming the opinion that you can polish it quite
a lot more than the plastic. Then there’s the issue of the pressure on the
press. I was getting quite grey whites, so to speak, but by loosening the
pressure slightly I got a cleaner white. Mike put the etching blankets on for
me and these really help. So really I think that to get a finished result I
would have to experiment with combinations of pressure, polishing and soaking
time but use the proper etching blankets.
 |
| Mabgate plate inked and ready to go |
I also printed the Mabgate drypoint
again, on Canaletto paper. Thinking back to the demo by Cath Brooke (see this
week 50 blogpost ), I remembered her using a similar weight of press on these thinner plastic
plates, so I gave it a go and was pleased with the result. A nice definite print,
better quality than from the smaller Hawthorn press. It was only afterwards
that I realised my memory was false and Cath had used a smaller press! But hey,
I got a decent result, and that’s for my fab friend Larissa.
Collage
When I’d reflected on the crit last week, I wasn’t sure what I’d got out of it. However, I took the advice and
I colour photocopied some parts of the MMU paintings onto acetate and onto
paper. I then did a bit of action research, playing around with these and also
with some leftover squares from the “tiles”. I did quite a lot of rearranging
and overlaying but in the end I cut things up into squares… you knew this would
happen… and the two images show the results I liked best. There were just some nice juxtapositions of colour and texture. I put these out on
Twitter and was pleasantly surprised with the reaction. A couple of followers retweeted
and I got some likes from people I’d not come across before. I took this to be
an affirmation that there’s something here for further development.
Moans
In the past six weeks I submitted
ideas for an exhibition piece and an abstract for a conference paper. I’ve
heard nothing. Fine, if my submissions are not what the organisers want – not everything
is going to be successful – but in these days of mailmerges and automatic
replies, why can’t they have the courtesy to send a “thanks but no thanks”
email? Grrr.
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