Amplifier, EPC #16
Hello,
Apologies that this Print Club newsletter is a few days behind the print itself. I hope you've received it in the last few days? I was really keen to get the latest edition in the post to you, before I’d really had the headspace to contemplate what I wanted to say about it. Perhaps to some extent that headspace had already been filled with the relentless news about Coronavirus, the American Presidential Election and now the dying days of the Brexit debacle. I’m working on new ways of keeping some clear thinking space for my own work in amongst it all!
Actually looking back from this distance, I feel that the year has played out far better than it might have. Back in March it seemed entirely possible that the first lockdown would damage the studio beyond repair. It took well over a month to see that in fact, the studio could survive, and work would continue. I’m always reminded of Monet’s amazing memoirs, in which he talks about painting the Waterlilies within the sound of the guns on the frontline. A task which he considered to be a patriotic act in the face of extreme adversity. By comparison I feel that I have gotten off very lightly indeed!
Clearly the art world will reconfigure itself in new, and no doubt interesting, new ways. I feel that people’s creativity is ultimately irrepressible, and so even if many of our current structures fall away, be that high street galleries, provincial art fairs, or even larger public spaces, new work will nevertheless continue to emerge, and engage us, in ways that we can only dream of. In that sense, I think 2021 is going to be an interesting new year.
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The Centre of Gravity
Just before the latest lockdown, a group of 60 mostly Bristol based artists staged a major group show entitled ‘The Centre of Gravity’ in a recently emptied ex department store. It had that edgy, deliriously exciting, feel that I haven’t seen much of since the early nineties, which was perhaps the last time such spaces were readily available to artists in a largely unmediated and unsupervised way. It was a refreshing reminder of the power of art to get out ahead of the crowd, and provide new ways of seeing and thinking, even in the depths of a recession.
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New website, v5
After only about two years since I completed v4 of my website, I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that I need to change platforms again! Perhaps I didn’t think quite hard enough about what I was going to need from the site over the coming years. Adobe, who hosted the last site, have pulled out of the market, making it nigh on impossible to add new pages, or edit the existing site any further. As a result, I’ve spent the last couple of months building a new site on Squarespace, that I believe is going to be a faster, more flexible, and ultimately far more dynamic space to host my work online. I’m looking forward to launching it shortly…
As part of the restructuring, I’m also planning on closing my Patreon page (!!) and moving it all across to the new site. I like the idea of having a single blog, as part of a single, better, site for all my work, rather than keeping a foot in each of two camps. Squarespace seems to allow for a more flexible approach to hosting the club, with a dedicated newsletter for people who don’t want to join fully, but may like to see what’s new, and they will also allow me to bill without VAT in sterling, which is a significant bonus. In due course, I am therefore going to ask you to move across to the new site, maybe sometime in the first 3 months of next year. No rush! I really hope it won’t be a hassle, I think it should make for a more positive experience heading into 2021, perhaps esp regarding the blog.
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New eCommerce gallery
Alongside the absolute necessity to move for editing purposes, the new site presents the opportunity to have an eCommerce gallery on the web for the first time, which I’m hoping may work well for the studio, as the high street and fairs model remains quiet, and people move their viewing time online. It’s certainly been an enjoyable task to set out my stall. I’ve also been immersing myself in the myriad ways in which the latest digital tools can be employed to engage an online audience, it’s a brave new world in many ways, and one that I’m happy to try out. To some extent we are probably simply arriving here 5 or 10 years earlier than we may otherwise have done, but the end destination, a reduced high steet with denser more substantive online spaces, has probably been inevitable for some time now.
Of course the art world demands to be experienced first hand too. So it seems inevitable that more loosely staged events will pop up throughout 2021, perhaps financed by these online marketplaces, and in that way these new physical shows may require less sales in the moment, which may in itself free them up to be less commercially constrained. It could well be a really positive change for artists.
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As I’ve been compiling the new web pages, I’ve been quite surprised at how many editions there are already on the new Print Club listing. Amplifier is edition #16 apparently. It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was making Bloom, EPC edition #1. It’s good to see that what started as a smallish side project has evolved into something altogether larger and denser. I’ll look forward to showing you the new cub listings online fairly soon, which go some way towards illustrating this!
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Amplifier / EPC
Amplifier /EPC is edition #16 for my Experimental Print Club. The piece revisits an archived drawing that has been loitering in my imagination for quite a few years, but hadn’t quite managed to surface until now.
The original studies take on the idea of a modulating series of concave and convex forms, which are in themselves rippled with a further waveform, rendered in glazed and tinted colours, that appear almost like scales on a fish. I’m not sure why I didn’t resolve the drawing originally, but it may simply be that I put it down for a while, and never came back to it. That tends to happens quite a lot, and has led to a significant archive of incomplete works.
There’s a great Mark Wallinger piece that I saw at his dealer Anthony Reynolds’ gallery on Gt Marlborough Street, before it closed. By coincidence, Great Marlborough Street was also the street where I rented my first studio, 2000 sq ft next to Liberty’s of London, maybe around 1995 I think, when affordable spaces in central London were still readily available. Wallinger had set up a projection of a seminal movie scene, the crucifixion as depicted in The Robe, but he’d blacked out almost the entire image. All that remained was a thin line of pixels around the edge of the screen. Amazingly you could still understand exactly what was going on, in part perhaps because the film is so iconic.
It’s always been a thought in my mind therefore, to experiment with the idea of over printing, or in some way knocking out, the majority of an image, to see how and if it continues to function. The idea is well known to graphic designers, who will knock out the top or bottom half of a line of text, which often remains surprisingly legible, or in the case of Jonathan Barnbrook, over ink an image of David Bowie, on his highly regarded artwork for The Next Day.
So with all that in mind, I worked up a flat grey overprint that knocks out most of the original image on the right hand side of the work, leaving just the horizontal lines that allude to the idea of a musical stave and a few of the concave and convex forms that the image is built from, presenting a starkly minimal contrast to the maximalist left hand side with its almost baroque feel.
There’s an interplay between the texture of the 2 parts too. One half is ultra matt, the other a glossy metallic. It’s fair to say that laying the two parts down with a tight join and squared up within the deboss presented a significant challenge at the print finishing stage, and more than one edition ended up in the bin! An enjoyable few days work nonetheless.
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So what's next?
I’ve rather fallen in love with the idea of making a Palladium print. There’s a depth of history there that seems almost irresistible to explore, and I’ve discovered a UK based studio where they still make them. The original process dates back to the early days of photography, but ultimately lost out to the all conquering silver halide process. The platinum print retains a strong fan base, and is, apparently, the only print process that remains non-fugitive, or in other words doesn’t ever fade, due to the nature of the way the chemicals mark the paper. Ultimately of course it’s about the aesthetic, which is a beautiful soft grey affair, you’ll no doubt have seen them, old Victorian photos, often with rather stern looking families posing in their finery. I’ll look forward to letting you know how I get on with it. If it proves impossible, maybe there’ll be other monochrome routes to explore for the image I have in mind. We’ll see…
Thanks so much for reading this far!
More soon - with very best wishes - Chuck
