Category: art

This feeling is the one where we are in a wild or semi-wild natural respite amongst an urban backdrop. Reeds, grasses, or cattails create their own swishy crowds in the space, maybe the ground is wet or muddy, and smells earthy and cool. Maybe a stream trickles nearby, hidden by the surrounding growth.

Swarm:
In this screenpainting, latest in the Process, Progression series of experiments, we see the parallelogram stencils again, in positive and negative this time. Also, pine needles were introduced in this experiment, as stencils. I wasn’t quite sure how they would look, since they’re very dimensional compared to paper stencils.

I was thinking of insects coming out of shadow in grass or a mound, maybe it’s under an overpass. But you are welcome to see whatever you want in it. It’s abstract!

This piece—part of the Process, Progression experiment group—was made with a larger screen, and diverges from the previous Flock experiment. Here, we did NOT step-and-repeat throughout the work as before, hoping to avoid the wet ink transfer and ghosting so prevalent in the previous step and repeat pieces, while also hoping to avoid all those little parallelograms sticking in the wet ink and having to be picked out after squeegeeing. The progression was instead accomplished by squeegeeing 2×2” sections in alternating directions with randomly applied ink colors over one contiguous large screen, resulting in a small amount of tiling pattern.
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Well, we avoided the messiness of the step-and-repeat, but like a thousand of those little bits stuck in the ink and had to be picked out by hand one by one with an exacto blade. I’m very thankful my super-encouraging and enthusiastic and sweet and helpful studio assistant @violet.anne_ , who participated and offered ideas throughout the creation of this one, and jumped right in to help with this tedious concluding task.
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More experiments to come.

Another Process, Progression screenpainting.

This piece is accomplished by taking another step in the Process, Progression series. Again, we are relying on random organic ink flows inside a screen, with some form-constraints, in this case a small circle and a 2-inch square field. To introduce randomness (aside from my janky carefree application of the screen print), we sprinkle paper dot cutouts, castoffs from the hole punch tool. Each successive swipe of the small 2-inch screen picks up more of them because the ink is tacky, creating its own random stencil through the successive printing operation. Screenpaint strokes were applied in a snaking pattern starting top left, moving right 5 steps, down a step, moving left 5 steps, down a step, and so on.
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A fun effect of this process is that when you step back and squint at the whole piece, it looks sort of like a messy inverted halftone gradient, which is what you might see if you look at a picture in a printed newspaper with a magnifying glass. But ours was made through a planned random process.
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It’s fun to have so many frames that create this piece, that we can stack them into an animation and watch the individual strokes and stencils change through the run. I shot each one and created a video from the combination.

Made with similar process as before, watching how inks progress and move as we add elements and colors and moves down the surface. More color palette experimentation. I was going to have a more muted accent but chose to go bolder.

A more subtle colorway, from a friend’s suggestion.

I flooded with the backing color and ran it out in successive swipes; used different tools for new shape experiments and ink medium for high translucency black; then squeegeed the whole mess, running that out to the bottom. For this piece, I was thinking of birds in a low fog and low sun.

I wondered what would happen if I squeegee in half circles, dropping inks into the screen randomly. Both these prints used the same technique and colors, but the look of the second one is affected by the action in the first. In the same way that screen prints I did with a stencil years ago in this screen still show up as ghosts sometimes in new prints. It’s cool to see one piece echo in the next one, whether screenpainted immediately after, of years later. It introduces ideas of memory and permanence/impermanence. And I like making the choice to accept the nature of the medium with its irregularities.

These screenpainting experiments are the messy pinhole-camera side of screen-printing’s photo-exact pursuit of perfection. Please note that the image of Process, Progression #4 is a temporary, non-adjusted photo of the piece, and it’s color clarity and saturation in reality is the same as #3.

Process Progression #1 & 2: Unstenciled screenpainting experiments. Trying to use the screen as a paintbrush, and allowing ink colors to mix in the screen well and in the squeegee. Each of these are 1 of 1. Please note that the image of Process, Progression #2 is a temporary, non-adjusted photo of the piece, and it’s color clarity and saturation in reality is the same as #1.