Printing and Print Processes

Lino Cut Prints

In the print making workshop I was prompted to produce a drawing to be transferred on to Lino as seen below,

I then transferred the drawing on to Lino 

Linocut is a variant of woodcut in which a design is cut into a sheet of linoleum with a sharp knife or lino cutter. A design/drawing is carved into the lino via the knife cutting out shearing of lino from the sheet. The linoleum sheet is then inked with a roller and then pressed on to paper. The printing can be done by hand or a press. Linoleum is much easier to cut into than wood but the pressure of the printing process is said to degrade the linoleum faster than wood. However linoleum prints still last a long time and can produce hundreds of prints.

Colour linocuts can be made by using a different block for each colour, as in woodcut, or by using a single piece of linoleum in which after each successive colour is imprinted onto the paper, the artist then cleans the lino and cuts away what will not be imprinted for the subsequently applied colour.

These pictures below are of my results off the Lino cut print process

In the print workshops the class were shown excellent examples of collages produced to go on to be used for the screen printing process, we were then asked to produce a collage ourselves for this process, in the same workshop I got involved in a topical conversation with my tutor Paul about a recent news broadcast about terrorism and counter terrorist action, this had an influence on my collages subject matter. 

These pictures below are of the collages that I produced

These pictures below are prints of the collages transferred to a screen print

I feel the results could be improved substantially by modifying the digital image of the collage on photoshop through adjusting the saturation and levels of the black and white thresholds and then reprinting on acetate and transferred back onto a screen to produce more and compare to see if this type of modification will produce the results that I think it can.

Visual Analysis 600 Word Report

Umberto Boccioni

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

This work I have chosen is a sculpture by the Artist Umberto Boccioni born 1882 died 1916, the piece is entitled Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913. The composition of the sculpture is best described as futuristic as the artist himself intended, the work is cast in bronze measuring 121.3 x 86.9 x 40 cm a traditional choice of material and method considering the futuristic imagination in concept and design.

The futurist movement that this work is associated with was inspired and driven by the speed and pace of mechanical power being developed in the modern world and was outlined by the futurist manifesto written in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and others, which included Umberto Boccioni who wrote the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. The futurist manifesto appears to take an aggressive attitude to history and saw it as their natural enemy to a future world united by technology, a world full of fantastic new machines such as motor cars, trains and aeroplanes.

The work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, depicts a figure unique in form as the title suggests, the super human like form expresses movement and the forces created by dynamism at speed, the fluid turbulent movement of air being disturbed by an all powerful mechanical soldier marching swiftly, almost leaving contact with the ground. The idea of including the disturbed and turbulent air surrounding the subject in the sculpture was a radical and new concept for sculpture in an era of new inventions like the camera at the time was capable of seeing more than the naked eye, movement could be recorded and slowed down frame by frame and studied for patterns in the movement of the subject being studied, this kind of new insight provided by technology must have been an important and welcome input fuelling their beliefs in technology supplying answers and expanding our understanding, unfortunately not everything in this surge of technology was positive it also contained more dangerous and negative inventions like machine guns, tanks and long range bombs, all these inventions designed for war of which Boccioni and his fellow futurist believed in the destructive power of war and its cleansing potential and the need to rethink and reengineer a new to replace the old.

The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture written by Boccioni could be considered to describe the framework that made it possible to create this sculpture. This is a small extract from the manifesto, Sculpture should give life to objects by rendering their extension into space palpable, systematic, and plastic, because no one can deny any longer that one object continues at the point another begins, and that everything surrounding our body (bottle, automobile, house, tree, street) intersects it and divides it into sections by forming an arabesque of curves and straight lines (1). The manifesto continues to describe what they believed to be key elements of the futurist movement that can be incorporated into sculpture and how this could be achieved. I felt on reading the technical manifesto that it contained everything that one could expect to inform and support the sculptural work of the movement and alternatively, the other way around, suggesting that the work Unique Forms of Continuity in Space embodies the writings of the manifesto. In my opinion the sculpture and manifesto still contains an alternative futuristic understanding and composition of the idea of intersected realities and different planes of movement being represented in a architectonic style.

Reference

Boccioni, U.B, 2001. The Futurist Manifesto. 1st ed. New York: MFA Publications

Drawing

Drawing

6 possible definitions of drawing according to the Oxford Dictionary

1. To pull or drag something.
2. To extract something from a container.
3. To cause something to happen.
4. To float a vessel in a specified depths of water
5. For a sale to be filled with wind
6. To make lines or marks

This module begins with a block of projects that explore the possibilities of drawing in its widest forms. After this point your practice will become self directed and you utilise the skills and methods learned in a way you choose. Drawing should continue to play an important role in developing your work; Either as a research tool or it may play a more central role. 

The word drawing is a verb (an action) which is why  the above definitions of drawing all describe a movement or active process. It informs most artistic practices and broadly speaking it can be organised into two categories;

1) Drawing for research (to plan projects and visualise ideas)

Many artist use drawing to inform their work. Robert Smithson's land art works for instance were supported by a huge body of heavily worked drawings, many of which are rarely seen. Alfred Hitchcock's archives have also revealed a vast collection of drawings, which is how he planned the content of his films.

2) Drawing as the central practice :

Drawing is also a medium in its own right - many contemporary artists only use drawing. This is possible because definitions of (and art in general) have exploded in the last 50 years. Drawing today 'looks' very different to the way it once did and takes many surprising forms. Drawing today 'looks' very different to the way it once did and it takes many surprising forms. Paul Noble ( Turner prize nominee) uses pencil to make enormous landscapes and Monika Grzymala draws with tape; making linear  installations that occupy real spaces. 

This module will explore both of theses categories of drawing.

As A class we were initially assigned small task's to create some drawings of objects that we had brought in and a task to produce 80 2 minute drawings in a sketch book before receiving the brief Utopian Architecture, the brief was to imagine and design my ideas of a utopian architectural space, environment or dwelling. 

Research

Initially i decided to do a search online on utopian architecture, i found myself looking at work from the late 60's by a group called Ant Farm, whose practice's were architecture, graphic arts and and environmental designs founded in San Francisco by Chip Lord and Doug Michels.

Some images of Ant Farm Projects

Having read a little bit about the group Ant Farm i discovered one of their main architectural influences to be R. Buckminster Fuller so i decided to research Fuller, i found several documentaries online of which this is one below.

I also found a website run by the Buckminster Fuller Institute dedicated to gathering the most interesting, up-to-date information, viewpoints, and observations advancing the legacy of Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth today and into the future.

Through the Dymaxium forum on the Buckminster fuller institute webpage i discovered an artist visited by the BFI arts group, Stephen Talasnik who was born in Southwest Philadelphia. He grew up in a working class neighborhood surrounded by oil refineries, shipyards, an airport, and a cemetery. As a child, he built roller coasters out of toothpicks, futuristic model cities out of discarded radio and television parts, and skyscrapers out of household product containers. One of his favorite childhood memories was watching the Goodyear blimp make an emergency landing in the local cemetery a block from his house. These are some of his sculptural pieces that intrigued me

These pieces above are fantastic examples of Stephens fictional engineering building intuitively with geometry. 

On a separate search inspired from a chat with Emily my tutor i discovered a website named Architizer a website launched in 2009 to make architecture and interiors accessible to everyone. Now it is the largest platform for architecture and design online hosted and uploaded by the designers themselves

After familiarising myself with the website i decided to become a member having been very impressed with the potential of the website, i decided to present my utopian architectural brief as a conceptual project, see the link below

http://architizer.com/projects/utopian-architecture/

These are the original images i uploaded

On the same website Architizer i found a project that was completed in 2014, a 25,000sqft industrial construction designed by studio suspicion called Sang Dong Charcoal Village,

 These I felt had remarkable similarities to my composition from photographs and paper model pictures as seen below

Having had good results from my paper models and still inspired by the World of Buckminster Fuller and his explanation of quantum mass and the tetrahedron being the minimum amount of sides/vectors to contain mass, four sides six vectors equals one quantum unit, the base of natures structure system and the geometry of its multiplication. With this in mind i decided to construct a nature inspired fixed length line model from cotton buds and wood filler to join the ends of my fixed length lines allowing the wood filler to cement the joins in a organically constructed way building one tetrahedron   on another in an unguided random construction, these images below are of the construction mounted on a thin plaster base

I also printed out some paper copies of some of the images of the model and decided to cut and paste  a 2D collage and introduced 3 point perspective projection lines into a compressed 3 dimensional model lines on 2D format of the printout that I had layered and merged through the introduction of pen lines to jumble the lines created from the 2D imagery of the 3D model and the pen lines joining the three layers of paper collage on one plain, as seen in the image below 

I then imported the image into photoshop and increased clarity and adjusted brightness and then printed some of the varying levels 

These images now looking very far removed from the origins as a cotton bud model with the intentions to create and develop a process of image making through mixing mediums of model making, photography, collage and digital image manipulation I wanted to take the above solidified images a step further by removing selected sections within the projected structure lines creating irregular shaped and spaced windows to a potential secondary plain introduced behind the cut paper in the form of pre printed magazine colour imagery with the potential to create unlimited amounts of different images available through the windows and solidified by the use of digital photography upload to reuse as a possible source multiply and continue in evolving a repeatable process from any input sources. These are some of my results so far