'Constructed City' 5: Hi Vis

All Images: 'Constructed City' Screen Prints (Work In Progress) With Associated Equipment,
Leicester Print Workshop, November 2019

My 'Constructed City' project continues to progress, albeit a bit slowly.  Fortunately, that's mostly for practical reasons - rather than any lack of motivation.  The decision to make this my first primarily print-based project, means practical work must mostly occur at Leicester Print Workshop, for now - which in turn means weekends and school holidays.  Slightly frustrating though that may be - the fact I'm wishing there were more hours when I could crack-on, is an encouraging sign that I'm fully engaged with this project, and not just dabbling.  Physical energy might desert me a bit faster these days, but it can still flow from mental motivation.  The fact is, I've happily toddled off to LPW for several Saturdays in a row now, with very little procrastination at all, often after a tiring week at work - which definitely feels like a good sign.  In fact, my most recent hiatus was the result of the Workshop's recent weekend takeover by Leicester Print Festival events, rather than any reluctance on my part - and I'm already itching to get back in.

Another reason for that, is the fact I'm writing this at one of those moments when I've just encountered my first proper bump in the road with some of these images.  The intention has always been to allow them  to build up through intuition, and out of the process itself - rather than according to some tightly prescribed plan of action.  Consequently, I'm feeling my way, both visually, and in terms of what I might actually achieve with  screen printing (and it's important to remember that I'm still a relative novice in that field).  My creative muscle memory, visual understanding and general printing chops, are far less developed here, than when it comes to, say - painting, collage (or even cardboard box wrangling) - which means I'm bound to take plenty of wrong turns as this project advances.

In this case, it's fair to say that the pleasure I took in the way a transparent layer of bright, cadmium yellow unified what was already becoming a rather tangled complex of preceding layers in some of these prints - was tempered by the fact it raised its own complications.  The reality is, these early statements were originally intended to lay down a kind of modulated ground, over which bolder statements might ultimately float - but have already become much stronger than intended.  The yellow tied things together encouragingly - and is a pleasing referent to the bold, hazard primaries so prevalent on construction sites, but it still felt too strident for the intended purpose.  It also departed from the more modulated qualities of the yellow-shrouded scaffolding imagery that actually inspired it.

Central Nottingham, May 2019

However, the real uncertainty arose when I attempted to knock things back with another layer of transparent white - itself pulled through a completely new stencil.  I instantly realised that white should probably have been mixed into the yellow ink, rather than as a separate layer, and that yet another layer of new imagery was possibly causing as many problems as it solved.  It's fair to say that the behaviour of cumulative layers of transparent colour (particularly where lights over darks are concerned), and of disparate layers of imagery - are things I've yet to get fully to grips with in screen printing.  They're only intrinsic to the whole blinkin' process, after all...  

   

And that's pretty much where things stand - at least until I can get back into LPW again.  But if that sounds like I'm a little discouraged - it really shouldn't.  As I said, the desire to learn experientially, and to allow things to progress organically, were built into this project from the get-go.  Making a best guess, getting it wrong, then finding a new left-turn out of the resulting impasse, is actually a fantastic way to learn, and to develop those creative muscles I hinted at above.  Comfort zones are to be avoided; the learning phases are always the most vivid of any activity; and anyway - the learning isn't ever supposed to stop, is it?  To be honest, it really just mirrors the way I've increasingly tended to operate, in my 2D work - at least, in any case.  The ability to relinquish over-clenched control, to willingly make mistakes - then find some form of, possibly unexpected, resolution in the solving of those mistakes, is something that has actively advanced my work, in recent years.  Once you're smugly convinced you completely know what you're doing - that's the time to really question your practice.

So, by the next time I report in, I should have already found some kind of improvised  solution to this little glitch - and will probably be blundering cheerfully into the next fine mess.  Of late, one of my recurrent mottos has been, "when all else fails - tear it up, and collage it" - so I guess there's always that solution, if all else fails.  All joking aside - the whole aspect of collage (or possibly something more akin to constructed assemblage of separate components), is something I suspect will become a pretty key feature of this project, as things develop (its certainly hinted at in my sketchbook).  However, it's too early to get into all that now, so I'll save it for future posts - once there's actually something meaningful to report.