Photolithography

I've been working with photo lithography for a few months and I've only just realised that I haven't posted anything about it. Probably because I wasn't sure why I'm so interested in this method of printmaking until now. I liked the formal appearance of the prints in contrast to my undisciplined style of painting but now the printing has taken on new meaning for me.

The process is quite simple but its a delicate operation. A black and white print from a laser copier is made wet and covered in gum arabic and then lithography ink. The gum arabic ensures that the ink sticks only to the carbon on the paper so you get a reproduction of the image on your selected surface. You run it through the press over paper or what not and you have a grainy copy of the picture.

One of my small lithography prints

The same print which I painted over

After I painted over this first print that I made I started making a lot more of them. Inevitably I decided I needed to expand the scale and to try and print on a large canvas(approx 2x3m). 

Then came the problems. First was the canvas surface, testing the printing onto different pieces of canvas I realised how smooth the surface needed to be for the print to work.  Next was A3 being the largest laser copy I could make so I had to split my image into nine pieces which I would reconstruct during the printing. 

splitting the image in Photoshop

I chose a construction of geometric shapes so it was lucky that it was a simple shape to split up which I did in photoshop.

Then there was the fact that the canvas was too large to fit through any of the presses and so I had to burnish the whole thing by hand. Not a problem, who doesn't like struggling for their art? 

And struggle I did. The whole process is a struggle to recreate a picture you can already see perfectly. For me this really made me think again about memory and recollection, most of the time you try really hard to preserve or recreate something that's never going to be what it was. When I was inking up the soaking wet paper you can see your picture perfectly but its so fragile and I knew from the beginning the recreation of the image would never be what it once was.

Final printed image ready for painting

 

 

I'm really pleased with the print especially since I imagined it wouldn't work at all.

 Another thing I discovered while making the print is that I'm not a printmaker, which is quite ironic. I made a LOT of mistakes and being a painter my attitude was 'I can fix it later' which I did, painters can fix ANYTHING later. Printmakers though, well most, are so conscientious and used to making perfect multiples that if the tiniest little blotch occurs they shove it in the recycling.

Finished painting in Studio

 Painting before and...

 after the final coat of spray paint.

Making oil paint from scratch

In my search for relation between the digital and analogue image I have decided to embark upon a quest for real materials and to try and understand why I paint.
When I'm preparing my canvas I feel as though I'm making some kind of relationship with it. A surface is created specific to my own intentions and judgements and becomes mine with care but paint has always been a substance I have a rough knowledge of. Like a lot of painters, when I paint the origin of materials becomes much less important than their physical properties.


So far I have discovered that making paint (as I had imagined before attempting this course of action) is a long and arduous process involving toil. Lots and lots of toil.

Reading What painting is by James Elkins with its comparison of the painter to the alchemist also makes me feel more confident about my trailer park style paint making "lab" on top of my freezer.
Although my neighbors probably think I'm trying to re-create Tom Waits Whats he building in there?

The tools (mortar and pestle, hammer and chisel, marble slab and paint muller) and rocks I used

• My process starts by going out with a hammer and chisel collecting soft looking rocks from the local area. I'm not sure of the specific rocks I collected but they were soft sedimentary rocks from the South Wales region and most likely to be old red sandstone.

• I take the collected pieces of rock and split them again and try to get rid of large areas of impurities in the rock. Then I crush the little pieces with some water (to control dust) in a large mortar and pestle.

crushing of rocks

I had to include steps to refine the pigment material after impatiently and foolishly thinking that the rock dust particles would be fine enough to grind into paint. They weren't. What I got was paint with sand in it which looked like shit. Literally as you can see here:


First attempt at paint, probably useful for painting pictures of poo and not a lot else

So I had to start filtering the dust like so:

• I pour water over the dust in the mortar and let the heavier sediment fall to the bottom. It takes about 20 minutes to filter out the grains that are too large.

  

mixed sediment and water

• Then I carefully pour the water off out into a plastic container making sure not to let bigger grains fall in.
• I leave this container on a window sill in the sun to evaporate the water and leave the fine sediment behind. This takes a while when you live in Wales not Venice. If Titian needed to dry out some pigment I'm going to assume it would only take a day or two in the Italian sun.

small amount of fine sediment suspended in water


Dried pigment dust

• After the water evaporated I took the layer of dust in the bottom of the container and scraped it onto a marble slab ready to combine with a binder which in this case was cold pressed linseed oil. I used a glass paint muller to combine the pigment and binder. During the mulling the smooth surfaces of the glass and the marble coat the pigment particles in oil. It takes a little while.
  

The final successful paint (about 2ml)

Of course the whole process needs to be repeated as the amount of material from each batch of crushing and filtering is quite small.
The method is by no means precise and the only colours I've managed to produce are varying shades of brown and grey.
The amount of labor involved in making the tiniest amount of workable paint is amazing. The process was very meditative and calming and the hours of crushing rocks gave me time to reflect on my ideas for paintings.

I'm going to continue making pigment with this process and experiment with different binders and possibly branch out into making grounds for canvas.

Some quick digital sketches

Some quick studies of the moonlight on the radiator in my room tonight. Made in Photoshop one layer.

Digital painting

Just practicing painting in Photoshop. Used CS5 with 3 layers

Lighting improvements

Lighting paintings with digital projections drawn with a tablet in Photoshop.
Also used fairy lights behind free standing painting

Apocalypse

Picture of the triptych The Last Judgment installed in Tate Britain

Just went to see the John Martin show at the Tate. I'd been waiting a while to see it and I was lucky I didn't miss it as it closed today.


I have mixed feelings about the exhibition. I love John Martin's work, I always have but the show really aggravated me.

First of all before I even got into the show I was reading the little hand out books they give you while I waited in the queue. Seven of the pages (and there were only 10) just gave examples of modern day productions which were inspired by Martin's work. I mean yes its interesting to hear about how people have taken inspiration but usually that kind of information takes a backseat to stuff about the artist and their life. Already before even seeing the displays I felt like I was being patronized. The whole exhibition seemed designed to make people more interested in art they might not necessarily appreciate but in completely the wrong manner.

Personally I feel that it is essential that any exhibition attempt to promote itself to a wider range of people and not just to people who are already interested in art. However this was just embarrassing.Getting people interested in art shouldn't be a case of changing art to please people.

The cherry on the processed culture cake was the projection show of Martin's triptych The Last Judgment , which is considered his most sublime and moving work.
It was, quite frankly, pathetic and so condescending I can hardly even bring myself to think about it again. It sounds hypocritical of me, as I'm currently experimenting with projections over traditional painting, but this was crass and infantile.
Visitors sat in a darkened gallery space while lights and even worse moving animations are projected over the paintings and voices with both English and American accents narrate the paintings for you, in case you know you can't actually look at what is in front of you quietly. It was very crowded I sat on the floor so it felt even more like story time in junior school.

I remember the first time I saw final painting in his triptych The Last Judgment. It was always in Tate Britain displayed in their permanent collection. I remember seeing it and being transfixed and I sat down to make charcoal studies of it and it wasn't receiving half the amount of attention I saw it get yesterday.

I just despair for a world where not only have people lost the patience to paint such sublime images, but have lost the patience to even look at them without a big animated light show and a voice to guide you through so you won't have to spend all that effort thinking for yourself about anything.

It wasn't all bad though. There were so many beautiful mezzotint prints on display that were just breathtaking. Another gem was a tiny illustration of iguana-don in a prehistoric landscape that sat on a page of an archaic geology manual.
I suppose all in all I'm glad that John Martin is getting more appreciation than he used to and that people will recognize his existence its just that its a hollow ghost of an applause unfortunately.

Experiment with lighting

I hung some paintings I have been working on recently in a secluded space away from my studio clutter. Mostly this was to see how they hang together.
The space was small and cosy but lacked sufficient lighting that is needed to display paintings properly. Then I started thinking more about the "proper" ways to hang and light paintings.
Paintings in National museums are often lit very specifically from different angles with varying diffusion in order to highlight certain parts of an image. In a way this means that the lighting is a secondary layer to the painting, akin to glazing in some way.

I had the idea to attach fairy lights onto my paintings, simply because I wanted to see what would happen. The effect of the lights in localized areas of the paintings worked well they added a new depth and reality. However as whole objects they were very scrappy with references to christmas that were just a bit too blatant.

Pipilotti Rist

View of work installed at Hayward Gallery

I can't say enough good things about this exhibition, it was ethereal beautiful and relaxing but also gruesome humorous and humbling.
I was enthralled by a piece called "Suburban brain" which included a tiny replica of a typical suburban house with working lights in the windows that flicked on and off like a home. I just kept watching the orange curtains light up and throw hazy beams out onto the pristine back garden, thinking of the Sims computer game and getting pangs of nostalgia.




"Selfless In The Bath Of Lava" (still shown above) really made me think about problems with my own work and made me a little bit angry too (at myself) because it reminded me of an epiphany I had a few years ago after finding a tiny shard of glass on the floor with my entire kitchen reflected in it. At the time and since then I've only applied what I learned to my painting work and I'm still doing this terrible pigeonholing with most things that I acquire. It's strange how you can think you're suddenly aware of so much and yet still not grasp the full potential of that knowledge.

The exhibition as a whole was strange for me because it had a commanding presence but it was commanding you to be free, to stop acting with normal gallery etiquette. Her individual projections communicate visceral body awareness in their specific content but it is the delivery of them that actually asks, if not forces you to try and recognize that your body is always active and present.

"Selfless In The Bath Of Lava" which you have to crouch to see and "I'm not the girl" where you have to stick your head in a box brings your mind back to your body's exterior actions while the giant mirror screen lounge room displaying "Lobe of the Lung" (which was like a REALLY long shoegaze music video from the 90s) brings your awareness to the passive movement and energy inside the body.

Collaborative installation/performance with Laura Gardner

Using a device of temptation (the cupcake) we wanted to investigate human behaviour in the context of morality and like previous work, etiquette.

We baked and decorated cupcakes and left them completely unattended and unsignposted on a table where we knew a lot of people would traffic between studios while we filmed from a secret position. We also placed a sound recording device under the table to catch the conversation of anyone approaching the cakes.

Our cakes pre-experiment

Every cake from the plate was eventually stolen and this was not the expected outcome for me. I expected people to be much more timid, I expected the amount (if not more) of attention the cakes received but that only one or two people would be audacious enough to take them.

Now that I’m thinking of these as more of scientific or psychological experiments there are more possibilities for the work, particularly it’s final presentation. Should we be drawing up estimated outcomes, should we be documenting more precise predictions than the speculative conversations during a tea break?

Could mock calculations and hypotheses be presented in a more whimsical state?

This piece really tested ourselves and was most importantly about helping to refine the methods we use to perform and install. Technically there were issues with this experiment and some documentation was lost.

Something that is still intriguing me at this thing, this activity, is that I’m not really sure what to call it because while our previous work was easy to label performance today’s “experiment” is difficult to describe. In a sense it seemed like the cakes were the performers and in baking them we embodied in the tray of cakes part of ourselves, or the characters we needed them to play in our theatre.

Also the concept of the cupcakes themselves is interesting to me at the moment. After reading the article in this months Artist Review “Consider the cupcake..” I’m thinking more about how the cupcake has become some kind of cultural icon, that if we used some less popular type of cake there would have been less temptation. A lot of people would agree that apple crumble is far more delicious than a cupcake but the cupcake has become more of a visual icon, very often cupcakes are decorated in a way that makes them look inedible (in fact two people were discussing over our cakes whether they were real or not). It’s beginning to have the presence of some kind of fashion accessory, that being seen eating a cupcake is very trendy compared to eating for example a flapjack.

Ann Voelke

"Take a nap" 2005

Just discovered the work of this German artist,

"who creates mixed-media paintings with a penchant for bright colors, geometric shapes, and street-art forms. My work explores the relationship between cultural plurality and a recycling of pop-culture, by layering different motifs from Science Fiction film stills and quotations from an art historical background, like Symbolism and color-field paintings"

from an online interview.

The composition of her paintings are testing the dimensions of the stretched canvas in a way that really interests me. The perspective created by the spray paint over well rendered oil gives me the feeling of distortion in memory that I'm trying to convey in my work.

Family dinner today....

became a heated debate about contemporary art when everyone began disregarding Tracy Emin's work as "crap".

Tracy Emin: Love is what you want

Went to see this exhibition today. It was perhaps the most crowded exhibition I've ever been to, especially considering the show has been open for three months.

Her famous embroidered blankets were the first pieces on display and it made me feel like they were items to be "gotten out of the way", as if people should see her most known work and not be distracted by the thought of wanting to see it later.
I suppose I think about retrospective type exhibitions in the same way as I regard the back of dvd cases for films you have never seen before. You see the screenshots and then you're filled with the anticipation of recognising the shots within the film. I think the same of knowing that famous pieces of artwork is in a show. Of course you want to see them, even if you know in general what they look like and have an idea of their meaning, because you need to confirm that they exist in some way.

My favorite pieces were some small paintings. I have always regarded Tracy Emins work as something great and insightful but the grace of her paintings surprised me a lot. They didn't have the hard visceral elements that her other work does. One painting looked to me like a woman lying with the back of a cat in the foreground. If I were very rich I would inquire about purchasing it so that I could look at it all day. It probably wasn't even a cat but that's why I liked it.

Although Tracy Emin is one of the most well respected contemporary artists in the world, a large portion of the general public seem to really disregard her work. I really hope that a lot of people who don't like her well known work went to see this show and maybe they would understand a bit more like I did.

I looked at a lot of the exhibition before watching the film she made about her traumatic abortion. Then all of the work was different and it wouldn't be the same again. It did horrify me and I was still horrified on the train.

The Age of Reason being the book I'm currently reading is a strange coincidence.

Running a creative workshop....

......is a bit different from what I imagined. Possibly because my vision of failure was that I would be inundated with people (inundated meaning dealing with more than 4 people that I never before met in my life). That my direction in the activities would be weak and HORDES of people would be bored and leave.
The reality of the failure (if it was a failure) is that no people (well there were 2) turned up for me to be scared of disappointing. But I'm not sure it was a failure entirely, of course it wasn't the kind of exciting energetic experience that changes people's entire outlook on life, which was obviously what every artist/teacher hopes to achieve by collaborating with people. However I did learn that I have quite a narrow view on what will be a successful art activity, which is possibly fed from the years spent in art institutions hanging around with other artists.
I've come to the conclusion that we artists are actually really easily entertained. I mean being presented with a huge room with a few plug sockets that is entirely devoid of furniture is pretty much birthday/christmas/new year in one for artists.
It was pretty stupid to assume that people would be as easily interested in creative workshops without persuading.

Some friends helping with setup

My extremely popular (NOT) workshop. Oh well live and learn I guess!

Curating experience

Some of my paintings hanging in the space

Before

After

This week I've been working on something called "The Big Empty Shop Experiment" with a group of people in Cardiff.
We've taken a space that's used as a halloween/christmas decoration shop in the winter and turned it into a gallery space running art cinema screenings, a swapshop and creative workshops.

Its involved a LOT of cleaning and just general tidying to make the space hospitable for artwork and the general public but my main job has been curating and hanging the work of local artists, most of whom are students.

I've never really enjoyed the actual hanging of an exhibition as much as I have this week, its been busy but not frantic which is what setting up in past exhibitions has been like. I think it's a combination of
1. Having to make decisions without consultation.
2. Being part of a REALLY good team.

It's strange though, because while I've been in curatorial mode I'm constantly looking at pieces of work but I'm not seeing them as I would normally. I'm surveying them more, I'm seeing them as dimensions and colour. I'm looking intently for relationship of form between the pieces and between the environment. Never thought I would say this but I love curating and hanging!

Memory painting

Painting from November 2010

Painting from May 2011

My memory painting has improved a great deal. I've found a more coherent way to compose images using the geological structures and diagrams that have ingrained themselves in my mind and form the foundation of my theories on archiving.
I have increased the scale of my work considerably which has presented me with ideas in paint I never thought possible.

New paintings

Landscapes of the area I grew up in

Caerfai Bay

4 of 38 photos taken in Caerfai Bay near St Davids in West Wales.
I intended to use the double exposure technique from my previous photographic work but when I got to the beach I found a mirror in my bag and used it in front of the camera lens trying to create distorted and impossible geological structures.
Yashica and 200 iso film.

I still have another film to process which are double exposures but taken with my diana mini and a black and white film which I have some more experimental plans for. Quite excited about those.