During the recent Bank Holiday when we were blessed with some decent weather I managed to get into the back of the shed and retrieve a large folder of ancient prints and drawings. The poor folder has with stood attics & cellars, floods & frosts, and seems to have come through it all fairly well.
The items inside it are mainly large-scale drawings, screen prints and block prints from both North Warwickshire College of Technology & Art and Winchester School of Art during my pre / Degree education. It always surprises me that I did so much work given the various distractions. It surprises me less how weird a lot of it is.
I haven’t included anything that would scare the children at this stage, I might need a subscriber only page for that. I would also need to check that none of the works are covered by a Super-Injunction of any kind.
You can see about half a dozen images here in the Art Gallery. I have been a little slack and not tagged or titled anything, mainly because I would struggle to remember what most of it is about. Invariably they are a mix of Jungian, musical,, theological and art history references. Most had long titles at one time which frequently change for no apparent reason.
The pictures shown here have been photographed, photoshopped, PicGrunged, Swankolabbed and Hipstamaticed before being posted here.
My personal favourite is the degraded screen print of Victor Mature from the 1950’s Biblical epic ‘The Robe’. I took the image during a regular Easter repeat on my old Minolta XGM from an ancient B/W television. I made about 30 or 40 prints all with different colour orders on different papers until the screen degraded beyond use. At the end we laid them all out on the floor of the studio in a huge Warholesque grid. I’m surprised any of survived given that they are on a very low-grade coloured sugar paper.
I have masses of other items scattered around the house, so more to come as and when.
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adrian4 
Barcelona 1986
28 years ago I was at Winchester School of Art studying printmaking & fine art. That covered screen printing, traditional lithography, etching, relief printing, letterpress and to some degree photography. It was fun. I lost my finger prints to strong chemicals and had a professional introduction to the uplifting possibilities of industrial solvents. I’ve no doubt in was a Health & Safety nightmare that is consigned to history unless you have extensive insurance.
One of the many other good things about WSA was the travel opportunities. Twice a year they took virtually the entire faculty to some exotic and educational location. I managed Paris, Moscow & Leningrad (as it was then) and Madrid & Barcelona.
The piece here is from Barcelona. I took some zinc plates with soft ground resist on and little card frames with newsprint covers, all bound into a little book with masking tape. If you drew on the paper the resist came away from the plates so that the line would etch when immersed in acid. They are only a couple of inches square so the sketches were immediate, complete in a minute or so. Not unlike traditional photography the final result only really showed it self post processing and printing.
The cover image was lino cut and the text plate printed on a small Adana Letterpress. Proper print making. I even purchased paper from an ancient art shop in the back streets of the city to tie the project down.
When we flew home the Spanish customs officer wanted to know what the little heavy block of metal was for. He rubbed his fingers over the drawings and prodded them. It didn’t seem to have a detrimental effect.
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Filed under Comment, Fine Art, Hipstamatic, Photography
Tagged as Barcelona, Etching, Madrid & Barcelona, Print Making, relief printing, Screen Printing, Sketching, Winchester School of Art