testing and open calls: following on from a discussion i had about landscape and image last week, i spent yesterday evening working on a small print edition for two separate submissions – a print fair in Galway Arts Centre and Trasna 8 in the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon. both open calls simply gave a brief of A5 size so that gave me free reign to work with any subject matter, material or process. open calls can be helpful in allowing experimentation in a focused way. it also gives an opportunity to test work with an audience in mainly gallery settings. i guess i need to keep in mind that experimentation also needs to be totally free at times, with no external brief or audience in mind. so perhaps i could balance the two.
landscape, image and colour: although i want to return to splitting the image and continue to work on different formats, i thought for this edition i might look at colour and think about what informs my colour choices in relation to my landscape print work. as discussed last week, the idea of working with both negative and positive images plays with the idea of ‘image’ as something that is evidently once removed from the eye’s experience and alludes to the building or making of an image. recently, i also started to work with a strong red inks and again i thought i might play around with inverted colours. i am reminded of my analogue printing days when i used red and infra-red lenses to create hyper-contrasted and ghostly inverted images in black and white. so for this print edition, i combined colours and contrasts of both using reds and dark contrasts. to say that my colour choice was logically decided by my thought process excludes the instinct that i relied on to make decisions about the mixes of intensity of colour and the position of what colour goes where etc. these ‘instinctive’ choices interweave with logic decisions in the printing process and might be responsible for the surprise of printing. so again, i guess i could balance the two.
(infra-landscape process)
(infra-landscape)
(infra-landscape, separate i)
(infra-landscape, separate ii)
(infra-landscape, inversion)
experimentation: once i had completed my small edition, i did some experimentation prints on the base layer by separating and inverting subsequent layers. this type of experimentation could go on infinitely but i like the possibilities it opens up for thinking about separation and inversion in terms of layers of the image as well as colour. all things for future consideration.
elaine crowe 