Lockdown week 15

15 weeks in and its beginning to really, really drag

Cases are down, GOOD. Deaths are down, GOOD. Optimism is down, BAD.

digital drawing

Digital Drawing continues to be daily a staple and making drawings with the hashtag #BLM is central to this structure. The drawing below is from the Grand Opening of the Fierce Festival last November in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when we could meet, (hug!) and share the best arts in performance, politics and Pop.

Frieze Launch, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery 2019. iPad Drawing.

Surface Tensions

I received an invitation to exhibit prints made during lockdown from the Printmakers Council to which I shared the analogue, digital, analogue print: Surface Tensions, with this description:

Prior to Lockdown, the abstract image began during testing of water and powdered lamp black ink on the gleaming glass printroom mixing surface. Its opacity was tested by fingerprinting on a scrap of cartridge paper which I photographed as it was so expressive. The image remained as a record in my digital photographic archives waiting to be revisited at this unexpected lockdown moment. I imported the image into photoshop and played with it until it ‘stood on its own’. As I do not have access to analogue print room facilities right now, I have had to conceive, trial and test new print techniques. The A3 inkjet printer I normally use for outputting photographic images for print planning was in need of a cartridge top up, and I began to experiment with digital printing techniques to preserve tactile marks. The finger ink image had a breadth of tonal and material marked qualities that offered an opportunity to test this digital to analogue print system. The image was proofed on a number of papers and once the image tone, colour and detailed marks were in balance, it was printed on coated textured Hahnemühle Digital German Etching paper.

Made by hand, kept as photograph, printed with inkjet.