Paul Coldwell at digital surface

CASE STUDY

Context

Brief outline of the artist’s practice

I have a broad art practice which has developed in recent years to responding to events, proposals and opportunities through a range of media. Printmaking has been central however and over the last ten years, I have used digital technology not only to make purely digital prints but also to revisit older processes including screen-print, intaglio and relief printing. My practice has been moulded by an understanding of making prints, the physical process of proceeding through stages to a finished work. I have always viewed digital print as part of a continuum of print processes and one, which is informed and determined by the economics of image production. It does however engender a very different set of relations towards making than with previous technologies. In particular the open ended relationship between the matrix and the print. Whereas in previous technologies, these were fixed in material terms, an image being developed on screen has a fluid relationship to its final output.
As an artists, whose practice embraces sculpture, the physicality of my work is a pressing concern and the meaning that is embedded within the surface qualities greatly effect my reading of the work. I am concerned in my prints with the idea of the surface as being a fact rather than an illusion. I also see the surface as giving evidence as to how the work has been made, ‘in time’. For me there is a great difference between physical layering and virtual.
I am interested in what happens across this surface and the way in which the viewer’s gaze can be entrapped. I also want the surface to provide resistance to the eye’s easy sweep and it is amongst many tools I use to try to hold the viewer.

Specific issues to the new piece of work

Framing Nature-Trees. 2008. Screen-print in 4 colours 80 x 54 cms onto 400gsm Somerset. Printed at Advanced Graphics, London.

This new print has been developed alongside other works for a show in Jim Ede’s house at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in September 2008, a project that has been funded by the AHRC. I will be writing a reflective essay for the publication to accompany the exhibition, which will place the print within the context of making work within a collection.
Framing Nature-Trees exists as a large complex print but it was originally conceived through very quick drawings on amongst other things, stick-it labels. All my work has its first manifestation through drawings in sketch and notebooks. These serve to capture ideas and stop me forgetting. Often, as with this small drawing, it was months before I acted upon it. The print brings together the languages of photography and drawing. The computer has transformed the way that artists can work across these languages, the photograph now being as fluid as drawing in terms of the way it can be manipulated and transformed. The photograph is no longer a fixed set of relationships.
For this print I fixed the size from the outset. Since the work needed to be seen within the specific environment of Kettle’s Yard, the size was made in direct relationship to where I imagined it being displayed. Once set, the size was fixed and that determined how I viewed the work as it progressed.
I wanted to explore, as I mentioned, the languages of drawing and photography. The
Photograph, in this case, of trees in winter, was imported and half toned. The half tone carries the imprint of the process by which photographs would traditionally be translated into print. I find this reference useful in centering the issues on the nature of print itself.
A second layer was made of a drawing of picture frames. This drawing was linear and mechanical counteracting the expectation of the drawing carrying an emotive charge. It was drawn in Photoshop using pencil tool, fixing the beginning and end of each line. It has the quality of a technical drawing with space suggested through the use of overlapping forms. In contrast, the photograph became more fluid and expressive, as I was able to modify individual dots. A further layer was then added of large random dots. The intention is to connect poetically with the fruits on the trees in the original photograph while also referencing the dots of the half tone as an abstract language. It also re-enforces the flat surface of the print.
From an early point in the image I was aware that a purely digital print would not carry the precise meaning particularly in reference to its structure of layering. Whilst I used the large format inkjet printer to proof, going through many changes and combinations of layers, I was dissatisfied with the homogeneity of the surface. Flattening the image in order to print inkjet literally flattens the image. What was once on top and below now becomes adjacent but furthermore with a uniformity of ink deposit. In screen-print however, each layers is printed separately building up a physical surface.
The image was delivered on disk to Advanced Graphics with each layer separated. Colour swatches based on the inkjet proofs were also presented along with colour notes, i.e. blue grey with a touch of silver… The prints were then proofed before being finally being editioned.
Screen print ink sits on the surface of the paper and is opaque In contrast to inkjet ink which is absorbed into the surface of the paper and acts like watercolour in that it depends on the white of the paper for it’s luminosity. To add to this a white was printed onto which each colour sits. In addition, to further draw attention to the surface, the random black dots were printed with a gloss varnish catching the light in a different way to the rest of the print.
The print could not have been made without the computer and with the ease in which changes can be made on screen once the material is digitalised. Throughout the process I felt that the idea of layering had to be retained in the final print. The print I believe has a physical presence with the layers being actual and readable across the surface and carrying with it a revealing of time and process.

1. Sketch 13×8cms biro and pen on stick-it label.

2. Frames 30×21cms inkjet printout