Carrying on with pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I took hold of the squares of vinyl I have been carving at random and started hacking away at the edges. I suppose like so many people I’ve been conditioned to think of two-dimensional art as something sitting neatly within a clearly defined square or rectangular border. I think this is particularly pronounced in printmaking, where metal plates and wood, lino, vinyl blocks come ready cut with nice straight edges. The tyranny of the border. So I took a hefty pair of scissors to them. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, it seemed unnatural to destroy those neat borders and also to do it at random, letting the cuts be guided by the way the scissors pulled against the vinyl, rather than directing the cuts according to some predetermined design, in the spirit of the 20th century Surrealist artists who deliberately tried to generate imagery through accident.
I love the destructiveness of art
Destruction then regeneration ☺
there are so many of those tyrannies; overthrow the oppressor!
Yeah!!!
I do this with most of my linos. I create images to be used as “vocabulary” for my Natural History monoprint series.
http://hladikvoss.com
That’s such a good idea ☺
They look interesting! Back in my college days i did woodcuts, and one time I picked up a scrap of wood that somebody else had cut into a random shape–it looked vaguely like a harp of some sort) and made a woodcut of medieval musical instruments out of it. I think working with oddball shapes does promote creativity!
I know an artist who does woodcuts on a massive scale who pulls wood out of skips and works straight onto it, whatever the shape
Even placed as they are in the picture they look more interesting already. You go girl!
Thanks Leonie. It is hard destroying them, but I needed to do it.