Printmaking has always been the poor relation of the art world. The print is something we traditionally buy as a reproduction of a serious piece of work (painting). The tradition of printing has evolved and the print maker maybe an
artist?
'Peter's exhibition was inspired by iconic images he used when he was at art school in the 70's on the theme of Beauty and the Beast - inc Sid and Nancy and Guy the Gorilla! - and I think the results are really bold and impactful.'
Rediscovering the printing process after nearly 40 years has been an interesting process - disappointingly modern inks are not as rich in colour (earthy colours are very plastic like) and modern waterbased inks don't become part of the surface, they sit on it, which is incredibly frustrating - the reason I took up printing in the first place was because of the absorbed flatness of the pigments.
Printmaking 2011
My heroes have grown old with me or they have died - maybe their death has been a way to freeze time, stop the aging process - not only for them but for me also?
I have always been a hoarder, newspaper clippings, postcards etc. It is only now that I have decided to recycle them.
What is the relationship between the woman and the ape? Who is the beast? This is another painting earmarked for my next exhibition. It is paint and print on canvas (size: 16" x 16").
Juxtaposing images, either as a collage or printing is not simply a decorative process it is a complicated exercise. The mind always tries to create a narrative between images. The juxtaposition of arbitrary marks, color, photographs etc. will always tease and trick the mind into rationalizing what it is trying to process and attempt to make physical world references - in other words make sense of what it is trying to analyze.
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The definition of what is art and what isn't has become wooly. Painting is often defined as the application of a medium applied to a surface with a brush but in reality painting can involve other practices like
printing.
There are generally unspoken guidelines for what makes a good painting. These intuitive components determine the painting's aesthetic value. These values and sensibilities constantly go through a shift, depending on cultural, political and social tolerances. There is no longer one definition for what makes a successful painting.
As an 11 year old I watched the first moon landing in 1969. I was mad about everything to do with space travel, I would read anything that was about rockets, cosmonauts and astronauts. Later in my life I shook the hand of a man who shook the hand of my all time hero Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, that was for me like touching history, if only secondhand (excuse the pun).
I have just been rummaging through old boxes of stuff and found the picture above – yellowed and faded – it still makes my heart flutter. I wish I’d been to the moon.
Woodcuts
The most inspirational
woodcuts (for me) are by Émile Bernard.
Émile Henri Bernard (April 28, 1868 – April 16, 1941) is known as a Post-Impressionist painter who had artistic friendships with Van Gogh, Gauguin, Eugene Boch and Cézanne. Most of his notable work was accomplished at a young age, in the years 1886 through 1897. He is also associated with Cloisonnism and Synthetism, two late 19th century art movements. Less known is Bernard’s literary work, comprising plays, poetry, and art criticism as well as art historical statements that contain first hand information on the crucial period of modern art to which Bernard had contributed. Bernard was in many ways, the young, educated and intellectual mentor, who was crucial in intellectualising and inspiring Paul Gauguin during the Pont Aven period of his career.
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‘Bernard’s ideas fired Gauguin’s enthusiasm, and Bernard’s important painting Breton Women in the Meadow (1888; France, priv. col.), a starkly drawn and crudely painted composition depicting a Breton Pardon, enabled Gauguin to go on to produce his own revolutionary painting Vision after the Sermon: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel (1888; Edinburgh, N.G.) in a similar style and composition. Bernard exhibited Cloisonnist paintings and prints of Breton inspiration alongside Gauguin and other artists at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, at the Café Volpini. This exhibition acted as a catalyst on the Nabi group and drew a number of new adherents to the Pont-Aven school.’
Text from MoMA.org (original source Oxford University Press)
An object or thing never has the same functionality as its name or image.... I think Magritte said something like this 80 or so years ago.
A bit of an odd statement but if you think about it it is very true. An inert object (or landscape) can't tell you what it is, we rely on our experiences through out our lives to explain what we see. If we see a chequered hillside we know that the boundaries (if they are green) are most likely to be hedges and the whiteish blobs are probably sheep contained within the fields. We can estimate the feel of the landscape: warm, cold, steep, flat etc.
In many respects transferring theses visual clues into (in my case) paint gives a prompt, a reminder of the general feel of the landscape... an estimate.
In all cases the created image lies about its representation. A representation/illusion takes on more realness than the actual physical object, the object then becomes a metaphor for the created illusion. This in turn creates an additional reference for the object, an extra visual adjective eg. 'The sky was very Turneresque.' Turner's illusion becomes a metaphor for the real thing, which vividly describes [in words] the actual sky. The concrete object cannot say everything about itself - it has a limited vocabulary and is unable to say what is required of it, it is on many levels mute.
