During the last two days at Preniac, we were encouraged to develop our ideas from our sketches and experiments with printing and painting. I decided to concentrate on the visit to Cahors as I was fascinated by the buildings there, the iron railings and balconies, and fading painted signs, overlaid with contemporary graffiti. I used a number of techniques on paper and then on fabric to develop my ideas:
- ironwork on railings
- Study of railings using discharge technique – acrylic paint, washed with black ink and then railings painted with ‘zest it’
- acrylic paint, emulsion and black ink on calico
I made a number of sample pieces and then decided to use some of the photos themselves. I wanted to deconstruct the photos a little and did so by repeatedly screwing the paper and then flattening, adding olive oil until the paper resembled chamois leather. A couple of the pieces I stitched together. As I was feeling inspired I just continued working without an end in mind, simply thinking about layering of materials, revealing old patterns and trying to represent what I saw and felt in Cahors.
Wanting to work on a larger sample, I took a large piece of calico which I thought would be suitable for what I had in mind. I had already prepared a few smaller samples on calico – splattering white emulsion, blue acrylic on the fabric followed by a wash of diluted black ink and then hand painted lines to represent railings. The idea of creating a larger sample or art cloth started developing, using some of my samples, photos and then directly printing and hand painting on top of the already prepared background cloth.
I spread everything I had prepared out in front of me, including photos and started moving items around.
- Looking at photos, samples and canvas art cloth
- Putting together samples, thinking about how I can put my ideas together
I had a lot of material I wanted to use but in the end decided to complete two pieces: one using the art cloth already prepared plus my ‘leathered’ photos and then printing and hand painting on top. I decided to stitch the remaining pieces together into a patchwork and as this would take a lot longer, I decided to plan and pin the pieces together but complete it later on. (At this stage I already had Assignment 3 in mind!)
So, at the end of the week this is what I ended up with:
- Putting together samples, thinking about how I can put my ideas together
- reorganised to make a composition – to be stitched together rat a later stage.
- Final composition with a small piece of red added
- Samples and photos bonda webbed onto painted calico background, ready for printing and hand painting
- polystyrene printing blocks to add to art cloth
- large sample