A step backwards and line drawings

After looking constructively looking at my lino prints I have decided to take a bit of a step back from printing and study the objects instead. I have always enjoyed making detailed observational line drawings and this is what I do most when I am not creating work for university, but for myself. These drawings have detail in them that I have not been able to achieve in a print. I also see more skill in them because of the detail than in the prints. I plan on making symmetrical images from these drawings and then making them into prints to make wallpaper.

Claude Monet

Oscar-Claude Monet (November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French Impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plain-air landscape painting. Masterful as a colourist and as a painter of light and atmosphere, his later work often achieved a remarkable degree of abstraction, and this has recommended him to subsequent generations of abstract painters.

Inspired in part by Edouard Manet, Monet departed from the clear depiction of forms and linear perspective, which were prescribed by the established art of the time, and experimented with loose handling, bold colour, and strikingly unconventional compositions. The emphasis in his pictures shifted from representing figures to depicting different qualities of light and atmosphere in each scene.

Monet has long been one of my favourite artists because of his use of colour and his application of the paint in his paintings. In 2016 I was lucky enough to view Pink water lilies (1897-1899) in the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. The painting’s pastel pallet and soft brush strokes combined with Monet’s subtle changes of colour create an outstanding piece of artwork. It is of no surprise to me that the paintings in Monet’s Water Lillie series are classes as masterpieces. His work is much more expressionistic than my own as in my current work I am favouring a more stripped back clinical drawing style. Looking at Monet’s work has influenced my decision to look more closely at the flower itself and to create more detailed drawings focusing on the object instead of the medium in which I am presenting it.

Circular prints

After trying to print with rectangular sheets of lino I tried circular to see if this would look better once printed. I used a small piece of easy cut that I got in a set instead of lino to see if it would be easier to use. The material is hard to carve and smudges easily when printing. I won’t be using this material to print with as I don’t think it gives a very precise print. It was hard to control the material when carving so the depth of the lines are very different. Although the circular shape is more interesting to look at than my previous prints, I can’t get any detail into the print because they are too small to carve a detailed image into.

First lino prints

To get a more accurate print I chose to try lino printing. This technique is easier than using wood carving like William Morris and a lot less time consuming. I used a () to draw from as I prefer to draw from either observation or my own images.

t has been years since I used lino printing and at first, I could not get the quantity of the ink right on the print. There was far too much and it made the print unable to display the image because the ink was getting into the carves. And then there was too little ink so you could not see the image or it moved while I was printing so the image was smudged.

Eventually I got the technique correct and got the image I wanted. I still wasn’t completely happy with the print so I got rid of the background so that the flower had a boarder round it so the image could be repeated without there being too much black. 

I like final prints but I still think they are not precise enough for what I was wanting to achieve by making my own wallpaper. I want to experiment more with printing to see if I can get the prints more precise. The overall look is still too messy and uneven. I also want to experiment with the shape of the print to see how this would look if it was a repeated pattern on a wall. This was only a small any would confuse the eye if it was on a whole wall so I want to experiment with scale.

Printing with natural materials

I was asked why I wanted to print with flowers and it was suggested that I try using other natural materials. I got a Romanesco broccoli which is one of the best examples of fractals and symmetry in nature, and a pineapple which also shows symmetry in its outer patterns.

Both materials were difficult to print with. With the Romanesco broccoli, it was difficult to print its patterns because there are so many dips that you can’t print. Although the object itself is interesting enough to be a piece of art, I would have loved to have been able to print its fractals. I rolled the broccoli across the page to see what marks that would make and it was not successful because they are just dots front the highest points. I also tried just printing a small floret which worked better because you can see that natural pattern more. 

I next tried printing with a pineapple. The prints I got from the pineapple were less successful than the broccoli. I was hoping you would at least be able to see the almost honey-comb pattern around the outer skin but it would not print so it was visible. I tried rolling the pineapple through paint to try and get the pattern but it resisted and would not print well. I rolled the pineapple across the page, like I did the broccoli, but because if its shape not being flat I couldn’t get the pattern to print. I also tried printing the bottom of the pineapple which I think it the most successful print as it looks interesting but it does not look like a pineapple and you cannot see the patterns that I was trying to demonstrate.

Both prints in my opinion were failures. They didn’t create the desired image of interesting prints, the prints don’t look like they have come from a Romanesco broccoli or a pineapple. I will contue to research prints and the how to gain the best results however, I will be developing into lino printing instead of printing with the natural material in hope of getting a clean precise image/print.

Printing with flowers

It was suggested in the first session by a peer that I try printing directly with the flower instead of using lino prints, I liked this idea so I experimented with it. I was going to use black so I could see the detail more easily but I chose to use a pale blue to match the delicacy of the flowers. I would try this experimentation with black because although the blue looked affective, the little contrast to the page made it difficult to see the print.

In my work symmetry and a clinical look is important to me. I like my work to look clinical so that the eye can easily distinguish the marks I make in my work. With flower printing, this was hard to do because no print will be the same, the paint will coat the petals differently and petals would fall off because of having to be pushed down.

They are interesting prints to look at because with some it is not clear it is a flower which is intriguing. Because of the dips in the flower you are unable to print all of it so you can’t see the whole image. I won’t be continuing with printing with the flower because it is not a way of printing which will give me a detailed image, which is what I wish to achieve with my prints.

Anya Gallaccio

Anya Gallaccio (born 1963) is a British artist, who creates site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter (including chocolate, sugar, flowers and ice).

Her use of organic materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, meaning that Gallaccio is unable to predict the end result of her installations. Something which at the start of an exhibition may be pleasurable, such as the scent of flowers or chocolate, would inevitably become increasingly unpleasant over time. The timely and site-specific nature of her work make it notoriously difficult to document. Her work therefore challenges the traditional notion that an art object or sculpture should essentially be a monument within a museum or gallery. Instead her work often lives through the memory of those that saw and experienced it - or the concept of the artwork itself.

Although Gallaccio uses the literal flower instead of its image, I find her work important to my practice because at its core is natural materials. Gallaccio uses the natural materials directly where as I perceive them in drawings. A number of her works are centred around the preservation and decay of natural materials, in my practice I wish to preserve the image of the natural material through drawings.

preserve ‘beauty’ is an installation work composed of bright red flowers arranged in four adjacent rectangular compositions underneath large panes of clear glass. The flowers are presented in a single layer with their heads facing out towards the viewer, and their stalks are positioned downwards, so that the lower edge of each panel features a band of green made up of the stems of the bottom row of flowers. The type of flower used in the installation is a hybrid between a gerbera and a daisy that is known by the name ‘beauty’. During the period in which preserve ‘beauty’ is displayed, the flowers wither and die, and this decay process is visible to viewers through the glass.