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:

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.

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: