Clad/Unclad [trans_late]

All Images: North West Leicester, February 2023

 

[Reconfigured/Translated Audio Transcription]:

Hegel Viacom has threatened to burn the books of the UK's insulation and fire safety industry, to threaten the Foreign Secretary with billions of dollars, to raise the fence, and to convene a deadly civil society on Settlement Day. Having raised more than 700 million in profits over 4 years, three companies were closely linked to the Gentler Reflow fire disaster, the June 2017 bombings, and 72 people killed in horrific attacks revealed by a public inquiry into Gentler Reflow. 

The house and materials in the literature are proven to build the structure of the products, to provide the highest production, and to insulate the regional signature. There are dangerous products that some of your members sell from the window. The opportunity for the department is to work in an open and informal dialogue to reach an agreement that restores confidence in invasive fishing in this country. Otherwise, consider using legal means to limit the criminal organisation that sells this problem. The country of the future will lead you to the people responsible for the failure of building companies that do not want to do what is right. Managers are not fully committed to protecting the health of the local population and improving the previous actions.

Significant Yellow Item: #2022.Y016 [trans_late / trans_scribe]

 

All Images: Central Leicester, November 2022

[Reconfigured/Translated Audio Transcription]:

This Weather Spoon restaurant suffers from the OIK fallacy. Erase the belief that everything is equal if it is already known. Well, duh! - the point is that the restaurant should take occasion to help the person who does not know what is the restaurant’s custom. No one was there to greet me, the customer. I needed to go to the bartender to ask at what table I may sit. No one came to take an order for a drink or for a meal or to clear the tables. There was a QR code if I had had use of a real smart waiter or waitress. I got up and went to the bar, maybe in order to phone my table to get the table number, or to pay for my order. There was no way of memorising my table number. There was no menu at the bar. There is an irony in the fact that there was on the customer's table a very large paper magazine. The food/drink menu could have been printed in the news (a tiny card could have explained that). Refusing a menu to the customer is Covid prevention. The map could have led me to the area where I noticed several elderly ladies had trouble. Negotiating these steps, chicken was brought to my table by someone you have to fetch alone. It would seem that the steps should be transformed into a ramp.

The chicken was very tender and must have been processed very well to be ready to be served so quickly. The grill marks on the processed chicken looked like the ones on the regal chickens. One must go to seek salt at another table, and condiments at another table full of coffee and probably tea by itself. There's nothing in the missing menu to indicate it. I wanted another drink but I didn't know what would happen to my plate if I had to go to the bar and get another drink. Note in hand then, I left - asking the scorer not to take my plate (there was no one there to protect my plate from things other people might do to it). I noticed there were menus visible on the way out but not visible on entering. The Weather Spoon was very successful with this mysterious system but for me it's quite short. When I come back to England I will never again try to eat at a restaurant.

'Constructed City' 1

All Images, Leicester And Nottingham, June - July 2019

As I intimated in my last post, I've spent a lot of recent hours photographing major building work.  There's plenty of that going on in my own Leicester back yard - and in Nottingham, where I'm a regular visitor, also. 

It definitely feels like it will probably trigger a new body of work, in coming months.  However, for now - it just feels like I'm in a gathering phase.  It's usually only after a period of immersion in the field that certain themes and associations really start to coalesce around a category of subject matter, and I'd never want to be without this process of just 'getting in among it' with the camera.  There's already the odd glimmer of something emerging, thematically - but mostly, I'm just happy to indulge myself with the sensory overload of all this stuff, at present.

Of course, there's a difference between the various meanings to be found in a subject, and the purely visual/formal correlations (closely connected though they may become).  One thing that's pretty obvious is that large construction sites are an absolute gift to my love of complex visual structures and formal geometry - as is amply demonstrated in this first little batch of images.  

I remember, as a student, being advised to let imagery evolve organically, by grouping visual material, be it primary sources or secondary influences, into connected categories - however simplistic.  Often, the easily made, immediate connections start to give way to other, less obvious, associations, in time.

In this case, everything here fits neatly into a pigeonhole labelled 'meshes and grids', and it's all pretty frontal and parallel to the picture plane.  So far - so much something I've always always loved.  But already, I'm also starting to think about relative degrees of complexity, and the introduction of disruptors into modular systems, as well as the whole idea of layering, and the compartmentalising of space, in three as well as two dimensions.  There also seems to be something worth exploring about just how many different ways there might be to fill-in space, both pictorially, and in terms of the urban landscape, in all of these.    

That'll do for now, then.  There'll almost definitely be a load more to follow, as the year progresses...

CMYK Screen Printing Weekend At Leicester Print Workshop

Untitled 4-Colour CMYK Screen Print (Test Piece) On Paper,
200 mm X 146 mm (Actual Image), 2019 

With a lot of time spent laboriously fettling cardboard boxes, fridge doors and abandoned trundle toys, over the last eighteen months - my printmaking excursions have been fairly few and far between.  I made an attempt to rectify that recently, and to reboot my enthusiasm for screen printing in particular - by attending Leicester Print Workshop's two day CMYK-specific training course.  It proved to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience, and has certainly inspired me me to get back into the workshop, now that the blessed school holidays have finally kicked in.

Untitled 2-Colour CMYK Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
200 mm X 146 mm (Actual Image), 2019

Untitled 3-Colour CMYK Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
200 mm X 146 mm (Actual Image), 2019

Although I'd done a fair bit of screen printing in recent times (prior to 2018's sculpture-orientated, spare time-devouring, energy-sapping endurance test), it had all been either single-colour photographic stuff, or featured the fairly unsophisticated layering of single, flat colours.  There's still plenty that can be achieved that way, of course (and certainly, I'd only scratched the surface of what's possible), but getting to grips with proper, CMYK separations, in order to play with the real potential of full colour, photo-derived imagery, felt like a missing piece of the jigsaw.

Untitled 3-Colour CMYK Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
200 mm X 146 mm (Actual Image), 209

Screen printing has always felt like a logical extension of the fact that nearly everything I produce, nowadays has  photographic origins.  Strangely - for someone who can often be pretty dim, or a bit 'analogue', where technology is concerned, the translation of imagery between different media, and the whole embrace of once wholly-commercial processes of image reproduction, feel pretty intrinsic to my process, nowadays.  It probably  has a lot to do with the resolutely urban nature of everything I do, and the way that such imagery contributes to the urban landscape.  Certainly, the insertion of oversized (usually highly idealised) commercial photo-imagery, into an otherwise physical (and possibly less than 'ideal') context, can provide some pretty thrilling shocks to the perceptual system, I find.

Untitled 4-Colour CMYK Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
200 mm X 146 (Actual Image), 2019

Untitled 3-Colour CMYK Screen Print On Paper Test Piece),
200 mm X 146 mm (Actual Image), 2019

I'm far from the first to notice all that, of course.  It's been a staple of the Post-Pop sensibility for 60-odd years.  Nevertheless, the interaction between the 'real' and the imagistic remains a key feature of the actual environments in which I spend most of my waking hours.  The appropriated, printed imagery of Warhol or Rauschenberg, the 'stolen' photography of Richard Prince, or Christopher Wool's boundary-hopping slide between paint, photography and print (and back again) all seem like pretty appropriate accompaniments to my daily experience.  Of course, younger artists might scoff at this - pointing out that these are all quite elderly exemplars, and that the physical or printed artefact is itself now 'well-obsolete'.  The integration of secondary imagery (or text) into our routine experience has, after all, become an all-pervasive, virtual process, at this stage of the cultural game.  The effortless negotiation of simultaneous parallel 'realities' is something many folks now take for granted, and hardly worthy of comment.  In which case, sue me! - I'm old enough for some kind of techno-historical perspective to actually make sense.  Also, staring at electronic screens, all day gives me eye strain.  Besides, aren't a bit of 'craft' and a degree of retro-appeal what all the really cool kids crave, these days?

Untitled 4-Colour Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
225 mm X 150 mm (Actual Image), 2019

Untitled 4-Colour Screen Print On Paper (Test Piece),
220 mm X 145 mm (Actual Image), 2019

Anyhow, I digress.  LPW's two-day course gave me all the new learning and techno-tricks I needed to make colour separations in Photoshop, and a useful refresher in the fundamentals of screen printing technique, to boot.  I was pleased to find that my muscle memory for things like photo-emulsion application, squeegy angles, and pulling pressure, hadn't deserted me in my recent absence.  I could just concentrate on the things that are crucial to full-colour halftone printing, like precise registration and relative colour density - without having to go all the way back to Square One.  As a result, the prints I produced (whilst they can only be regarded as experimental practice pieces) turned out to be encouragingly successful.  In fact, I've even sold one, without actually trying  (who'd've thunk it?). 

Oh, and if any eagle eyed visitors here should notice that not all my registration was exactly spot-on - I blame an initially loose pair of hinge clamps.  The only sensible course of action was embrace the error, and designate the wonkiest of my early prints as  'experimental', as the cyan and black went on.  That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

All Remaining Images:  Sneinton, Nottingham & West Leicester, January - July 2019

It is worth noting that the image I chose to reproduce was selected from an ever-expanding tranche of recent photographs, concentrating on major construction and redevelopment activity.  There's a lot of that going on in my neck of the Leicester woods, just now - with several major new buildings already nearing completion, and a lot more scheduled to follow over the next few years.  This is all part of the grand plan to redevelop a significant tract of West Leicester, between the inner ring road and my own neighbourhood.  It will transform the riverside area formally known as Blackfriars/St Augustines, and extend into the equally neglected post-industrial Frog Island area beyond - to exactly what effect, only time will tell.  Those particular environs have featured on here, several times, and I'll confess, I'm already slightly mourning the loss of one or two of my old favourite derelict hot-spots. 

But to live in a city is to embrace change and celebrate often-dramatic physical transformation.  If the region is to be transformed from a marginal playground of creeping stasis and desolate reverie, into a sleekly designed and heavily marketed zone of new-found density and intention - so be it.  The changes now unfolding are undeniably exciting - as new structures emerge, and empty sections of the map, and equally vacant intervals in the city's skyline, are suddenly filled in.  My lens already loves the intricate networks of scaffolding, complex geometries of newly-erected steel, jointing patterns in incomplete cladding, and glistening curtains of fresh glass.  The insertion of functional constructors' signage, developers' marketing babble, and aspirant, hyper-real architects' impressions all feel like valuable grist to the mill too.

Certainly, it all feels far too significant to ignore - particularly for an artist who constantly bangs on about being so in tune with their urban surroundings.  If, as seems likely, it all provides fuel for another eventual body of work - perhaps there's no reason why that couldn't be a largely print-orientated enterprise.  As ever - we'll see.  In the meantime, I'll conclude this post with few more taster images - possibly to prime the pump, as it were.

Thanks to Katie, Harley, and all at LPW concerned with organising the CMYK Screen Printing Weekend,  29-30 June, 2019.  I plan to be back soon, to implement some more of my new learning.

Colour / Not Colour 9

Both Images: Central Nottingham, May 2019

It seems I've been resurrecting a few slightly neglected series on here, lately.  The images in this is post could easily fit into one of several familiar categories, including 'Yellow Things', 'Grey Things', 'Scaffolding', or 'Urban Geometry'.  All of those themes have recurred, in one form or another, at different times, over the last few years.  Ultimately though, it feels like the two images, captured only meters apart, in Nottingham, a few weeks back - best illustrate the idea of 'Colour' and 'Not Colour', played out in similarly abstracted subjects (albeit on two very different scales).  

I often tell myself not to be so predictable in my habitual selection of geometrically formal, picture-plane orientated, minimalist, quasi-abstract imagery - but then I walk past something like this, and off comes the lens cap, as if by involuntary reflex.  I guess the eye loves what the eye loves...

Anyway, he function of neutral 'Not Colours' in contextualising actual colours, is something all painters, in particular,  must come to terms with, sooner or later.  And it seems just as important a feature of the urban landscape - where drab masonry or utilitarian surface coatings often rub cheeks with saturated, synthetic (and often self-coloured) materials.  Certainly, both of these examples seem to typify the kind of artificial, industrial colours that interest me far more than traditional artist's pigments, these days.  And, of course - I'm always a sucker for Cadmium Yellow and Battleship Grey.

I often reflect how, in recent times, I've spent hundreds of hours staring at the bits of cities most people just pass by - and how I've sourced far more of my materials in the aisles of B&Q, than in any art materials supplier.