MA Week 73 – Monoprinting with Movement!

Reflection on the past week, 19^th June 2017

I spent the earlier part of the week continuing to consider what I could submit for the “Movement” Summer Group Show at Left Bank Leeds, following my conversation with Michelle last week. I felt that the Burley drypoint wasn’t yet developed enough. However, the circles-and-squares soft ground etching from a couple of weeks back  was of interest as there seemed to be a lot of movement just from those few shapes.

Other ideas included doing another etching of Royal Park and printing it at each stage of the aquatint, or doing a long drypoint of the MA journey. However, both of those will take too long at this stage and they are not particularly to do with movement, although both are ideas that I may take forward before the end of the MA. Eventually I decided that I would do something specifically to submit to the Show and that I would use the tried and tested method of monoprint with resists of letters and stylised map which I developed from the dérive withMichelle. To these I added some of the shapes I saw. This approach made sense as the dérive was a physical movement, and coincidentally it terminated very near to Left Bank.

Chute-ing star

Ahead of this, I had a sunny lunchtime walk on Wednesday to the Royal Park pub area again (I am becoming obsessed with this area) and also took some more pictures of another coal chute I came across. As the print room was closed on the Friday, I only had Thursday to do the prints, so rather than try to laser cut the street and other shapes, I hand cut them from thin card on Wednesday evening. I managed to get the letters laser cut on Thursday morning. I chose the letters from “LIBRARY” as the now-defunct Burley Library was one of the most interesting parts of the walk. I then realised that a lot of these letters are duplicated in “Royal”, as in Royal Park, so that confirmed my decision.

 Thursday was a frenzy of monoprinting. I would have liked to have used a blue and a red ink as my two colour choices, but I was unsure whether they’d combine to a vibrant purple or a grotty brown, and I didn’t have time to test this. I chose cadmium deep red and cadmium yellow based on the red and yellow tulips we’d seen at the start of the walk, on the basis they’d mix to a nice orange. In the event they mixed to more of a brown, but this didn’t matter too much as it could indicate the colour of the bricks of the houses around there. The red got a bit too dominant, and I tried thinning it with the transparent ink, but this just made it sticky. I was a little bolder than when I did the previous monoprints and in some I left quite a lot of white areas. I also tried to print the inked shapes onto the prints with some success, but this needs more experimentation.

 

Monoprints with Movement

I got a good number of prints, and hopefully some will be suitable for submission to the Show. I need to review them and pick out the best ones.

Other than that, I’ve started a detailed reflection on the Troubling Time conference, which will hopefully work up into a source document for academic and visual research post-MA.