Wednesday 11 April 2012

A Unique State

My mind is jumping from place to place...overwhelmed with things I must get done, the noise from the renovation is loud, jarring and constant.  I am finding it difficult to get into any sort of creative routine at the moment and the time spent in the studio is sporadic.  Any sustained creative flow is constantly interrupted by administrative thoughts and to do lists. Things I need to get organised for the business seem to be forefront in my mind and I am finding it almost impossible to switch off from this to focus on more creative endeavours.

In an effort to break the creative drought and to try and find respite for my mind from the ever growing to do list I have gone into the studio telling myself just a half hour of play, that is all you need to do. 


I am not a traditionalist printmaker, especially when it comes to repetition...printing the same print over and over again just bores me silly.  Even when I have created editionable plates, once I have pulled a good print...I am rarely interested in printing it again. In the past I have worked very large, the majority of my prints have always been 1-2 metres in size. I don't have access to equipment to work with this scale anymore so have had to try and find a smaller size that speaks to me.  I do seem to go from one extreme to the other and am finding the intimate 10x15cm postcard proportion working for me at this point in time. 


My favourite method of printing is monotype, I love it for its unique state - one off event - the here and now - can't be repeated - the immediacy of working directly - layering and the serendipity of accidents.


Mostly I print bleed prints, which means having an image that extends to the edges of the paper...no border or frame (the white border in these pics are default with the blog template and I can't work out how to remove it) for me the work becomes more object like.



I have been printing on small left over scraps of paper, no expectations...except that I work for at least a half an hour. 







At the moment the challenging part is initially committing to that half hour but once I do I am ok and the half hour sometimes turns into 3-4hrs as I lose myself in the process.






It was a good creative workout!


As you read this post I will probably be in Copenhagen with my daughter-inlaw Olga and grandson Henry for just 2 nights...you can read about the reason for the visit here.



5 comments:

  1. Love the prints Vicki! Do you use them as cards or frame them for your walls? I think I may have worked out how to get rid of the white border to your images (I have been looking at blogger.com too!). Go into Design/Template Designer and click on Advanced, select Images, and for background color click on the drop down arrow next to the color box. You should then see a Transparent box. Try ticking that and see if it removes the white - hopefully! Same thing for the border. Hope this all makes sense. Cheers.

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  2. Thanks Anita, that will remove the border from every post but I just want to remove it from individual posts...mainly when I upload images of artwork...if you find out what the html code is for that I would be eternally grateful...I have Googled but nothing seems to work.

    At the moment I am just experimenting with the prints and mounting them on bookboard to see how stable they are. Currently I have 7 on the wall in a horizontal row with about a 2cm gap between each and they work rather well together.

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  3. Love the prints Vicki, can't wait to see you working in your studio.

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