Realise: Painting, Print and Intuition

When I went to the print room, I told them I wanted to play with painting on prints so they kindly gave me a sample from the new printer to try. Although I had intended to paint onto the image, once I took it to the studio my immediate impulse was to scribble in yellow over the flowers.

Once I had printed some of my own images, I tried putting gouache on print to see what the effect would be. I painted fairly intuitively, and with Tacita Dean as an influence, and ended up blocking out fragments of the background in order to highlight elements of the fore. I chose gouache as I’d seen other artists using it on photographs, it dries quickly and can be translucent or opaque. I liked that it was fairly translucent, marks that were made were visible in later layers and it created a veiling. As a neutral colour that I’d seen other artists use, white seemed like a good choice as it is slightly affected by the colours below. I didn’t want to create just a block colour as I didn’t want it to look like just a cut out and so the texture that the gouache provided was welcome.

Though both were very different responses to the images, I was quite pleased with how they came out. Both images provoked a very different interaction, there was no uniformity in response. Perhaps this was because one image was not mine and was curated rather than found in nature. I haven’t yet articulated why I am drawn to taking images of nature but there is definitely a pattern, in London this is not as immediately available and I find myself drawn to anything organic, whether it is nature or traces of people. I think it could be the transience and movement of things.

I had also tried painting onto an image as a kind of filter. The scans is taken were imperfect, darl and grainy and j wondered what the effect would be if I altered them by hand. I applied gouache to areas that would emphasise light in the sea as a test.

Perhaps it was to do with the harshness of the black lines dividing the image but the other two images felt more impactful, more evolved, more intriguing.