Print in the Blood - Solo Exhibition

Glasgow Print Studio - April/June 2021

There no doubt that I am besotted with the magical world of printmaking in all its guises and have been since I first screenprinted a set of cotton placemats while still at school. It really is in the blood. My father, my uncles and my cousins all worked in the newspapers and from my fifteenth birthday my Saturday job was as a Copyboy for the Sunday Express.

I had thought of calling my next exhibition, Gone Fishing, and this refers not to the images but the process of finding the images. Like fly fishing it is a solitary process and finding images takes time and patience. This is particularly true of my Urban Landscapes. The journey is an essential part of the creative process and this is true too with the water images in the exhibition.

Many of the water images are from the North West of Scotland and I journey there on a regular basis. The area around Arisaig and the journey to get there is just so inspirational, blue seas with white sand and views out to the islands of Skye, Eigg and Rhum. The purity of the water means there are shell covered beaches and multicoloured seaweed that I have grown to love. Having said that, as often as not I leave disappointed with the photographs as the sea rarely lives up to the hopes and expectation when setting out.

So many things have to come together to get something that grabs me. Sunshine really helps and so too does a high tide, as does the position of the sun so as not to cast a shadow of oneself, and of course, the wind that disturbs the surface of the water in ways that are rarely what I am hoping for. It could take several trips to find one image that I can use.

It isn't easy to say exactly what I am looking for in an image but considerations include: the pattern of the waves; reflection on the surface; the clarity of the water; the prismatic effect of light passing through the water; the composition of the shoreline, sand, shells, rocks, seaweed and so on.

I love photography although I wouldn't consider myself a photographer. More an artist that loves to use photography and printmaking to create images. Combining both allows me to edit photographs and transform them in to something new by editing the image in a way that a photographer can't. It was true working in analogue and more so now with digital technology.

My printing technique has evolved over the years, using new technology as old ways become obsolete, and even digital technology that I used twenty years ago has come and gone.

After a rigorous editing programme an image is selected and developed in photoshop, editing out unwanted bits adding and removing colour, cropping the image until eventually settling on an image to translate into a screenprint, occasionally, if required, combining two images to make one.

This editing process is essential as the screenprint, usually 106 x 57cm will take several weeks of intensive work to complete and with as many as 30 or more layers, one wrong colour or misregistration could spell disaster. Working with water based acrylic, registration is a real problem with paper expanding depending on the area being printed and the humidity. And it is expensive. Thirty layers means thirty same size digital positives, thirty screens to coat and expose, to print, to clean and to strip, along with the cost of Somerset paper and gallons of TW Graphic and Lascaux acrylic ink/paint. So, getting the image right in the first place is crucial. I proof and edition as I go along so it is inevitable that a few are lost along the way.

The technique is based loosely on CMYK and this is the order in which they would be printed, in fact I never use black. I use as many colours as I need to and will add in purples, oranges and others in various strengths to create the desired effect. Like underpainting I will often print stronger colour than required then overprint with opaque and translucent layers to tone down the whole image before building it back up. The effect of colour glowing through a translucent white can be quite bewitching. This multi-layered approach means that the finished works have a visceral quality, a tactile quality that couldn't be achieved in a digital print. And of course there is an archival permanence about them.