Reflection
on the past week, 12th June 2017
As I mentioned a
couple of weeks ago (see this week 70 blogpost)
), the College holds an Art Market as part of the end of year show and I had
decided to submit some work. It was quite exciting preparing for this. I took
the best 5 prints of the gentrified office building (now titled
'Gentrification'), plus I decided to take the prints I did for the Manchester
Metropolitan University (MMU) PGR conference back in February (see this week 58 blogpost)
. I wrapped them in cellophane and they looked pretty professional. I decided
to price the work for that particular market, especially as the College were
not taking a percentage.
 |
| Prints packed and ready to go to the Art Market |
Friday was the
opening night of the show and of the Art Market. As mention below, I met
Michelle beforehand and the Art Market was in full swing by the time we got
there and met some of my fellow students. I was thrilled when the sister of one
of my classmates bought a 'Gentrification' print plus one of the MMU prints. It
made all that time in the print room seem worthwhile.
On Saturday
morning it was my turn to do a stint on the till at the Art Market and I was
joined in this task by a student I didn't know but who was very pleasant and
easy to work with. I'd not been there long when my lovely tutor, Sharon,
appeared. She also bought a print of 'Gentrification' and I was secretly very
pleased although I pretended to be tut at her! It was really interesting to see
what people were buying - a real mix of stuff, it wasn't the case that one
particular genre or medium was flying off the shelves.
 |
| View of the Art Market - my prints are the green ones above where the girl is standing |
I had a quick look
when I went in for my tutorial today (more on this below) and could only find
one 'Gentrification' and two of the MMU prints left – looking quite exciting!
Printing
After dropping off the prints at
the Art Market on Thursday, I went back into the Print Room, and I was in there
on Friday too. I’ve been doing some further work on the Burley drypoint
(see this week 69 blogpost
).
I worked further into the plate, to try to get some lighter and darker marks.
Then I tried it drypoint with a painted monoprint on top. I experimented with
mixing the coloured ink (cobalt blue) with a transparent ink extender to give a
lighter background. This worked OK, as did variable inking of the background.
However, most of my efforts at the painted monoprint were rather too
indefinite, and the drypoint seemed to come too far to the foreground in
the print. On Friday I tried the transparent ink again, this time with a
very high proportion of it, but it got quite sticky and difficult to work with.
It did give slightly better results than the previous day, but I’m not sure if
these are really two separate prints that I'm trying to put together. I don’t
know where, if anywhere, this is going to go next. A possibility might be another
drypoint plate as the foreground, or perhaps trying a different colour
foreground or mixing some transparent ink into the black so the two layers
might “equalise”.
 |
| Experimenting with inking the Burley drypoint |
I also took the first prints of
the aquatint of Royal Park that I was working on a couple of weeks ago (see this
week 70 blogpost). There were supposed to be three tones
within the print – it had been bitten three times after applying the aquatint
solution - but it seems that all the tones had rather collapsed into one. After
discussing with Mike, I put another liquid ground onto the plate and worked
back into it to try to get some darker contrast into it. However, the result
now looks rather too dark – I haven’t been able to get a satisfactory print and
basically the plate looks over-worked. I was disappointed with myself but I can
learn from this. Really I need to do a test strip beforehand for the aquatint
and possibly print it at each stage, although the thought of all that stopping
out fills me with dread.
 |
| The aquatint before I worked into it again - should've left it there! |
Catching up
As I mentioned
above, I met Michelle beforehand to catch up with what's happening in her
practice. As always it was a good conversation and we discussed opportunities.
She had previously encouraged me to submit some of the work based on our dérive
for the group show at Left Bank on the theme of 'Movement'. I showed her some
of the work I’ve mentioned above and we talked about whether these would be
suitable and how I could develop them.
Another catch up
was with my tutor, Sharon, at my tutorial on 12th June. As ever, there was lots
of food for thought. A large part of the discussion was around what I will
submit, as the deadline is now only two months away. There was also a lot of
discussion around the idea of the Royal Park aquatint as a journey. Further
ideas were around embossing the paper on the Burley monoprint instead of having
two layers of print. Much to do!
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