MA Week 27 - pylons and printing

Reflection on the past few days – 13^th May 2016

 

The week unexpectedly turned out really positive. I managed to get into the print room for an hour after work on Tuesday and pulled the first prints from the pylon plate. OK, it’s not the best drypoint ever, but it is certainly the best one I’ve done and the marks really worked for me. The blackness is good quality. I felt really happy when I peeled the first print off the plate. It’s visually communicating what I want to communicate. It’s also the first one I’ve done with the new etching needles and it was great to get off to such a good start with them.

 

Pylon print one

Today (Friday) I went back into the print room and worked into the plate a little bit more, to add a bit more detail. I then decided to try printing it in red. This linked back to the writing in red ink that I did last weekend, and this question of whether the red marks might be really black marks but in a different colour. I experimented a bit with double-printing, too. My conclusion is that the black works better. The red seems too light for the fairly light weight of the lines. The red isn’t really saying what’s inside me, either. So back to black, for now at least.

Pylon : red

Pylon : double print, red and black

 

Then I had a really insightful tutorial with my personal tutor, Sharon. I had become quite aware that my subject matter seemed to be hopping around a bit (buildings, cranes, pylons…) and wasn’t sure why this was, nor whether this necessitated further theoretical perpectives. After discussion I concluded that I am inspired by the industrial landscape (as opposed to the natural landscape) and these items are all part of that landscape. We also discussed the fact that I’ve taken photos of factories, pylons etc whilst on a journey, in those cases a car journey, but that this is not all that different to the Armley generative wandering. It is a response to interesting things whilst on the move. 

This may bring in theories of place. I’d looked briefly at phenomenology during the week and wondered if this might be the theory I needed – exploring lived experience?? But the discussion turned to the fact that we are shoehorning visual practice into theories used for other subjects, other areas of enquiry. I suggested we need theories of our own as creative practitioners. Quite what my theory would be, I’m not sure, but it would be something about black mark-making.

Sharon also challenged me to think about working with other people’s histories. Could I do this? I don’t know. What if their marks weren’t black? Should I be thinking about written and/or oral histories? Diaries? Soooo very much to think about.  

Sharon also encouraged me to continue to write reflections, whether on post-its or whatever, so that I don’t lose the sense of the moment and place and time of creating whatever I’m doing. So I’ve come home and started immediate blogging!

 

The advent of the pylons - time, place, lunch!

I took some photos of pylons on another car journey. This car was being driven by an old school friend, Fran, and contained another old school friend, Clare, in the back. Fran is a musician, amongst other talents, and we’d been discussing the creative process whilst en route to Clare’s house. I was telling her about drawing industrial infrastructure and that I fancied creating some work about pylons. So she encouraged me to photograph any pylons I saw. There was a monster one at the motorway junction for Clare’s place and this is the one featured above. Our destination was lunch with another old school friend, Moira. By the time we met up with Moira the other two had also become pylon spotters and were pointing out particularly picturesque pylons on the return journey. A creative by product of a lovely lunchtime!  

 

MA Week 26 - reflection on the last two weeks

Reflection on the last two weeks – 9^th May 2016

May has definitely felt better than April, and I am getting back into gear with both practice and critical thinking. It would be nice to say I’ve made good progress, but that’s probably overstating it… however, I have made progress.

Over the past couple of weeks I got back into the print room and did some more monoprinting. This time I used the arm rest as Lyndon had advised. I found it difficult to get a continuous line as the arm rest got in the way. I wonder if I should try a smaller piece of paper (A5?). However, the results were much better without me inadvertently rubbing my hand over the paper as I moved the pencil. I continued with the pylon theme, though I completely failed to blot the paper enough the first time round, but this still gave an interesting effect. I also had a go with some grey paper that had just arrived and this gave a nice “industrial” feel. I also had a “doodle” to see what effect I could get from rolling the pencil or deliberately rubbing the paper with my fingers.

 

Pylon monprint on grey paper

I reached a point where I decided to have a think about how to work into the prints. I had a bit of a creative block about this but eventually decided to try a bit of red acrylic and to think about the shapes within the pylons. This worked OK but seemed to go much better when I tried some looser, more fluid marks over the paper which had become textured from being inked by rolling the pencil. I think I will ink some papers this way simply as a background for working upon. Some of the shapes also looked a bit “Chinese”, which wasn’t totally unexpected as the abundance of items made in China is part of my theme of the decay of British Industry.

 

Monoprint/acrylic experiments

In the same delivery as the grey paper, I received some drawing nibs and decided to have a go with these. A couple of people (my tutor and a couple of classmates) had mentioned that my notebook could be an artwork as the writing is small and even. I had been resisting writing about my work on all fronts as part of challenging myself to priortise the visual, so using it in artwork seemed untenable. Anyway I decided to do a piece of free writing about writing onto one monoprint. It really loosened my mind. It occurred to me that I will freely admit that I think in words – so why don’t I make the words work for me, rather than allow myself to be dominated by them? By writing, visual creativity somehow opened up. This may well have been in part because I was using a new writing/drawing instrument, and also because I was writing in red ink rather than my beloved black. But it was at least in part because the free writing turned into critical thinking about whether the writing was subverting the artwork, or vice versa. From now on I will write as I did in the last two terms, but just not as much. Then I can see more about what I’m doing and why and where it’s going next, but not get overwhelmed.

Writing about writing

 I still wasn’t sure what to do about the monoprints so I cut up one of the grey ones and put it back together fairly randomly, then looked for new connections and marks I could make. The lines are rather thin, and the larger square seemed to fall neatly into four quadrants, but I could immediately see that I could work this up into perhaps some small acrylic pieces.  I hope I can get onto producing them this month, then they could go into the WIP show on 10^th June.

 

Re-purposed pylons

Also in my delivery of art treats were some etching needles, and I have etched a pylon into an A5 drypoint plastic, but alas I didn’t get time to print it. So that can be part of next week’s creative practice.  Progress and a way forward… didn’t seem possible in April!