Experiments On The Dark Side

I’m an unashamed printmaker and scribbler and I don’t paint. Don’t get it, don’t understand it, don’t like canvas and brushes. Give me squeegees and rollers and barens and presses any day. So I thought I’d enter an international painting competition. Yeah, I go looking for trouble. So I decided I’d try and construct a painting using printmaking tools, materials and techniques as much as possible.

I’ve been experimenting by coating smallish offcuts of thick mounting card with several layers of rabbit skin glue. When it dried, I used a squeegee to apply a layer of printing ink in Rhodamine Red, thinned down with linseed oil [Gerhard Richter often ‘painted’ with squeegees] and then I used the Direct Monotype technique to put drawings and text onto the surface and let it dry over several days. Today I applied a second layer of printer’s ink in Lemon Yellow, thinned with medium plate oil, again using a squeegee. I didn’t do it over the whole thing as I’m exploiting colour theory and I want to get different colour mixes by using transluscent glazes. While it was wet, I wrapped rags around my fingers and removed some of the yellow, exposing the pink below in areas of patterning.The Welsh painter Nicholas Evans used a similar technique, although he only worked in black and white [I think].

When the yellow area is dry, I will apply a coat of Pthalo Blue, again thinned out to make it easy to squeegee and so it’s translucent. I’m hoping for a similar effect to the 3 colour-separation monotypes I’ve been working on recently. Is it painting? Well, it’s not printmaking because a print is an image that has been taken indirectly from another surface, or matrix. This is being applied directly using pigment suspended in oil, which is the same as paint.

Watch this space ……….