Completed Printed Paintings: 'Extracted Fragments Series'

'Extracted Fragment 1'  Acrylics, Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape, Ink, Spray Enamel French Polish
Misc. Solvents & Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Following my recent post about the works shown here in progress, here’s one showcasing the final results.  The challenge was to combine on the same panels, my well established methods of painting and collage, with an element of screen-printing.  As already mentioned, my recent forays into printmaking have never really been focused on the idea of becoming a ‘pure’ or specialist printer, but more part of a general desire to incorporate it as just another possible avenue of expression within my overall practice.  These days, my attitude towards unfamiliar media, (or those whose surfaces I’ve only scratched), tends to be - why not have a go if it feels appropriate?  

Detail Of Above

I’m reminded of a student in the year above me, on my Fine Art Degree at Bristol Polytechnic, in the early 1980s, who cheerfully produced large, bold canvases - combining screen printing and expressionistic slathers of paint, in a pleasingly direct manner.  I’m ashamed to say I don’t even remember his name.  However, I was struck by the way he would screen photographically-derived imagery straight onto his canvases, seemingly unperturbed by the criticisms of tutors who suggested he should commit to one tradition or the other, or that that the results lacked any solid foundation in drawing.  It seems baffling that such limiting attitudes should have prevailed so long after the example of Rauchenberg, Warhol, and a whole generation of Pop artists, decades before.  It’s perhaps even lamer, that it took me many more years to shrug off my own fixation with the ‘struggle’ to wrest an image out of the mud of tortured paint or endlessly erased charcoal, which had frustrated my own progress for so long.

'Extracted Fragment 2', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, Various Solvents
& Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above.

'Extracted Fragment 3', Acrylics, paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, Misc Solvents
& Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016 

Detail Of Above

Don’t get me wrong, - I love a good Giacometti, or Auerbach, as much as the next person, (probably more, to be honest) and have spent many rewarding hours in life rooms, over the years.  Nevertheless, I’ve worked with much greater freedom since I gave up agonising over the defects in my drawing skills, or obsessing over the noble ‘impossibility’ of it all.  In fact, I haven’t drawn much at all of late, preferring to source imagery through the camera lens or the chance operations inherent in collage techniques, and yet have generated work far more fluently, (and processed many more ideas), as a result, than I ever did previously.  I’ve also recognised that the incorporation of text to suggest ideas, or as clues to possible meaning is perfectly valid, as far as I'm concerned.

'Extracted Fragment 4', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Misc
Solvents & Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above

Another reality is that, since I began seriously working on my own stuff again, some years ago, relatively little of it could be labeled as ‘pure’ painting at all.  In fact, the vast majority of it has, (with varying success), lain in a kind of hybrid zone - somewhere between painting and collage.  Although my anorakish tendency is to often to list specific materials, much of it might simply be labeled ‘mixed media’.  Thus, appropriation, translation of mechanically harvested imagery, scrambling of media within an individual work, or the cheerful absorption of new (and sometimes untutored) methods into my overall practice, all feel like various parts of my becoming the sort of artist I was probably always meant to be.  Somewhat tentatively, I seem to be embracing some of the sampling or remixing sensibilities characteristic of modern musicians, within my own visual practice.  It’s a shame it took me so long to become a ‘contemporary artist’ but hey – we can only move forward from where we are now.

'Extracted Fragment 5', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, Misc Solvents
& Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above

'Extracted Fragment 6', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Misc
Solvents & Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above

Anyway, I’m in grave danger of just repeating the same old story, I realise.  That is, nevertheless, the context in which these new pieces currently swim.  It may explain why the not-really-that-groundbreaking idea of combining collage, paint and screen-printing in a single work (or series of eight) feels so significant within my own practice.  Getting a little over excited about small personal breakthroughs is part of the deal for plenty of artists, I suspect.

'Extracted Fragment 7', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Misc
Solvents & Screen-Print On Panel, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above

That notion of these eight panels as individual components comprising a series is very important.  My idea was to produce a small body of work in which certain motifs might be repeatedly recycled in slightly different forms and combinations each time.  This idea of imagery being re-versioned or mutating through repetition is a common thread in all of my current output.  Of equal importance is the whole area of ‘process’, and the translations and scope for repetition that arrive as imagery passes through different media, and back and forth between the analogue and digital realms.  The reproductive nature of the screen-printing process needs no explanation, and its compatibility with the materials already employed in the panels (barring one small technical glitch), made it an obvious way to promote those ideas.

'Extracted Fragment 8', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish,  Misc
Solvents, Pencil, Coloured Pencil, Ballpoint Pen & Screen-Print On Panel,
30 cm X 30 cm, 2016

Detail Of Above

In terms of specifics, the TRA# tag, and the 36-frame motifs separately distinguish four panels each, with a third grid of heavily degraded spots (actually perforations) linking the two sub-series.  Each element was extracted from an individual photograph - being a neat snippet of graffiti, the vestige of an industrial door numeral, and a detail of a smoking bin, respectively.  Although serving as simple clues to the urban environment, each, in its own way, makes reference to ideas about lost messages, discards, absences, cancellations, vestigial clues, coded texts or entropic processes.  It also occurs to me there’s a tenuous link between the residual tape frame accompanying No. 36, and the framing characteristics of the # symbol in what is quite literally a hash tag.  One could even go so far as to suggest that each motif signifies a kind of blank portal.  I’m retrofitting these secondary associations, even as I write.

South West Leicester, May 2016

South West Leicester, May 2016

Central Nottingham, November 2015

Anyway, the ‘Extracted Fragments’ series is what it is really: It represents a small step forward technically, and another take on the idea of repetition within a standard model - in which processes of sampling and reproduction are made integral and overt.  My intention is that some, if not all of the panels should appear in the forthcoming ‘A Minor Place’ exhibition, with Shaun Morris and Andrew Smith, in Studley, Warwickshire.

More information about that should appear here soon.