Watercolour linoprint

I have printed, using Speedball watercolour inks, a four-panel linocut of commuters in front of the departure boards at Victoria. It was my first time with watercolour inks and I found it hard to get a good impression.

Next time I hope it will be easier. The difficulty was getting the right balance of water and ink. There was a suspicion, too, that the press wasn't printing evenly, although the same result was achieved when I printed the other way up.

Overall I'm not exactly disappointed with the result, I got one good print, and for this project that's what I was after.

Linocut ideas at Tate Britain

Today, when I visited the Tate Britain, I was preoccupied with linocuts...and so was drawn to Patrick Caulfield and Paul Catherall.

In my art, I like the idea of mixed media and am interested in collage and photo montage. It is used to great effect in Paul Caulfield's picture (below).

What I found interesting about Patrick Caulfield was that After Lunch is acrylic. I was very surprised as it looked so like a print! The colours were very clean and solid. I know this was an early work and that he went on to make a number of screen prints in a similar style.

This set me thinking again about my ideas of blur and focus to highlight the difference between inside and outside (inside a train carriage, outside a train carriage, inside commuter life, outside commuter life).

I could create a lino print of the interior of a train and then, like Caulfield, introduce an over-saturated image, a photo or similar, into the piece.

I've always liked the print (below). It hangs in my aunt's house. Today I discovered it was a lino print by Paul Catherall. I like how the colours work together, and the sharpness achieved by the solid colours. And taking the essentials of an iconic building such as Battersea Power Station and creating something similarly strong. The style seems particularly appropriate for the building.

Human interest

At the moment I feel there has to be at least one person in each work I am involved in. It sounds odd, but without the human interest I feel there is no interest...at least, for me.

I am feeling anxious. I want to push myself to experiment, to be adventurous. I have to keep challenging myself. And this is hard, sometimes. Maybe I need to try to hold to the idea but think of new ways to work with it.

I am trying to get my head around suicide cuts – a method of printing several colours from the same block. It's a very strange process, but I think it could produce something interesting.

Divided

At the moment I haven't settled down to painting in the studio at college and am not sure how that can work. I find it hard to paint in public! I have more time when I am out of college to focus on painting, but it isn't easy to shuttle back and forth with oil paintings...

So at the moment I am working on the project along two separate paths: painting out of college; printing (eg, linocuts), research and photography at college.

More Wings of Desire

When the child was a child, it walked with its arms swinging. It wanted the stream to be a river, the river a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea. When the child was a child, it didn't know it was a child. Everything was full of life, and all life was one. When the child was a child, it had no opinion about anything, no habits. It often sat cross-legged, took off running, had a cowlick in its hair, and didn't make faces when photographed.
Damiel: [voiceover]
IMDb Quotes: Wings of Desire (1987).

And when the child grew up, it became a commuter. And life was elsewhere...and that was terribly sad...

Fragments

Lots of things going on in my head!

Stay alone! Let things happen! Keep serious! We can only be savages in as much as we keep serious. Do no more than look! Assemble, testify, preserve! Remain spirit! Keep your distance. Keep your word.

This is a quote from the film Wings of Desire. They are the words of an angel, Cassiel. This film is about the secret observation of people, but somehow in a good way. There is huge sympathy for the people who are observed.

I'm thinking about surveillance. Exploring the lives of others. The Handmaid's Tale. How my mum felt after therapy – the experience of opening up completely.

Commuting is just a part of everyday life. It's an ordinary situation. That's what I like about it. I am not an angel (!) but I feel sympathy for these people. And I do see part of my job being to 'look, assemble, testify, preserve'.

I have been working in black-and-white, using blurring effects to represent time and tone to represent mood. In Wings of Desire colour is used very sparingly, to represent unusual or strong emotion. Most of the film is grey...

Notes on Two Commuters

A few more comments about the picture that I am working on (see Two Commuters, below) of an old couple on the train. They were a lively pair, having a completely ordinary conversation - about the Rugby World Cup, as I recall! They seemed younger than their years.

I am painting them in the style of Gerhard Richter, but this surprises me, because when I think, it doesn't really reflect how I saw them.

They should be in warmer colours. In comparison with commuters, they were a lively blur, as warm as the blur outside the window of the train. All the same, I am happy with the way things turned out. As an experiment with the technique of blurring, I think it has proved reasonably successful.

Questions and Some Answers

There are lots of questions that need to be asked already, in relation to this project. I am not sure I know all the answers! Here are some questions that have been put to me, or that I have put to myself - and my attempts to answer them.

• Is the secret photography of people ethical? That's difficult. These photographs are not in the public space. I use them only as snapshots to assist my memory. Is there a code of ethics covering such things? I don't know. I can see the difficulty. I try not to be invasive, and the identity of the subjects will remain private.
• Who decides if it is ethical, or not? I think this is the answer to the first question. I am not sure if the artistic process should take into account what is ethical. Any response to artwork is personal. It is not up to me to decide. 
• Can such photography be sensitive? I would like to think that it is. I am a commuter, I understand the feelings involved.
• Why do I take some pictures and not others? I don't know what compels me to take certain pictures, or to keep some pictures and throw others away. The composition itself, the arrangement of people, or expressions, or something else...
• Am I too ambitious about my project to care about how the people I am using as my subjects might feel? I would hope not, but I have no intention of making these pictures public. They are visual notes.
• Why am I taking such pictures, anyway? So I can remember particular situations and images.
• I want to see myself as respectful and non-judgmental, but does that mean that I am? I can't comment on that.
• Is Nick Waplington judgemental? If not, why not? I don't think that Waplington is judgemental, but it would be easy to be judgemental. He lived with the families, became part of the families, and I believe his pictures reveal great warmth and affection for his subjects. And John Berger agrees with me!
• Would I be happy to show these pictures to someone else? Yes, if I was happy with them in the first place.
• Do I need to think more about what I am doing? Always!
• Is what I am doing any different to, say, a poet making an observation about how they see people? I don't believe it is different.
• If somebody saw me taking a picture of them how would they feel? I don't think they would like it. They would feel I was intruding on them. And they'd be right. Maybe I should prepare an apology and an explanation, just in case!
• I am invading people's space, how do I feel about that? It's awkward - but then it shouldn't necessarily be easy for me to do something. Having said that, I admit that I enjoy it. I hope the ends will justify the means.
• Was Oliver Reed's A Text Message photo posed? I think not.
• Could I do this project without taking photos, just writing notes and painting from my imagination? Not very easily. But I do enjoy it more, this way. Maybe that's a bit weird. Am I a peeping Tom? I don't think so. These people are all in the public space. They are not behind curtains. There is no privacy on trains.
• Do I need to take a more ethical approach? I don't think so; this no different to staring at someone sitting opposite. 
• I dont know any of my subjects, but someone will. Does it matter if someone recognises a friend or a relative in one of my pictures? This shouldn't happen, because I don't intend to publish.
• A picture of my friend was printed in the paper, without permission. Was that right? She was involved in a public meeting. She was in a public space. I know there are laws around such things. I don't know what they are. Anyway, she didn't care. Her family bought lots of copies of the paper! And seriously, we are always being seen – in papers, on TV, on CCTV. There is no privacy, these days. I do not feel my project is about privacy as such, but it is about the private space that commuters occupy. I am not disturbing that space, I am just observing it.

Reflection

Trains sometimes provide an opportunity for thinking. Often, you see people staring through their own reflection, out at the fast-moving landscape, apparently lost in thought.

On the other hand, here is a commuter who does the long trip from London to Brighton. I like the rush of blurred colour in the window, while he sleeps.

Two Commuters

I have been working on a painting of two commuters. It's a work in progress. On a large canvas. The image has been disturbed deliberately to appear blurred. I wanted to make it hard at first to establish the edges, to understand the shapes. I used sponge brushes that were given to me by a student to achieve the blurred effect.

A Different Approach

My approach, while influenced by Richter, feels slightly different. I believe he uses distortion and blurring as a way of making the observer look deeper, beyond the surface. 

So far, I have been thinking of these ideas (ie, blurring) as a way of emphasising  difference. That is to say, to create a difference between the contained, hard-edged reality of commuting and the unfocused nature of everything else – basically, the life on the other side of the train window.

Commuters exist in sealed units. They cannot focus on other things when they are commuting. The rest of life is blurred, unreal – and yet it is life...alive, varied, rich. In comparison, their hard-edged days must be tiresome.

Gerhard Richter

Richter’s work made a much bigger impression on me than I had expected. 

Beforehand, when I thought of Gerhard Richter, it was his blurred works that came to mind. But there’s much more in this exhibition. A lot more colour and more abstract works than I imagined. What I liked most was the variety of his subjects. I had expected his portraits to intrest me most, but it was the landscapes that caught my eye, and the different approach he took to certain subjects. He works mostly from photographs but for some reason I feel his paintings are more alive, more realistic. He makes photographs seem like grubby snaps and his paintings improve on photos.

He really focuses on colour tone and brushstrokes and these sometimes distract from the often simple subjects of his paintings. In some pieces it is simply about the tone and colour rather than the object. With The Candle, you spend more time looking at the tone and colour rather than the object and you realise, after that, that colour is very important to the feel of his pieces. The soft glow reaches beyond the canvas.

A lot of his big canvases take a simple idea and work at it in great detail, with the emphasis on tone and colour. I was pleased to see how, in certain pictures, traces of the working grid are visible. In some of my pictures I have found it hard to eradicate the grid. In Bombers Bomber, the grid almost feels an integral part of the picture.

Study for Clouds reminds me of when you hold a balloon up to your eyes and see the faint blurred outline of the objects, but not focus on their colour. This strikes me as a key to understanding Richter. He forces you to look beyond the surface, to look harder. Distortion is important and  yet there is a calmness to the pictures. Some are so blurred it is hard to make sense of them unless you work hard. For example, Paris is a large picture, but you have to to squint to view the building.

I had attempted a similar idea with my Linocut (see Stranded, below).

The exhibition makes me want to experiment with my own pictures. For example, to try scraping thin and thick paint over canvases and dry-sanding them down. Of course, I could blur my pictures in PhotoShop first… but that would be a little pointless. I would rather create effects myself than achieve them in a purely mechanical way. I like how, in certain pictures, the grey streaks make a sort of splash puddle effect, achieved apparently by painting blurry straight lines then disturbing while still wet. Or for example, the smoother effect he achieves in Two Couples, how, when you look at it up close, it seems as if he soaked the canvas in white spirit then painted over it so the colours blended more…

Portrait

Yesterday I went to the Gerhard Richter exhibition. It gave me the confidence to work further on the first portrait of the commuter and inspired me to attempt to experiment with the theory of blurring the image. I am pleased with the outcome.

Silence in Southwark

The emptiness is unusual, here. I like the shiny stillness of the first picture, with one commuter standing still, straight as a soldier, apparently facing a blank wall.

I also like the way, in the second picture, that the lines converge to a dark point in the distance, as if showing the direction of travel.

Blurred Reflection

Another picture of the commuter, taken in a tunnel. The blurred reflection interests me. Again, I am reminded of Gerhard Richter. I will look closer at this picture. I would like to paint it, but the newspaper puts me off. I'm not interested in painting that. Perhaps I can do something with mixed media. Or perhaps there's another way.

Travellers vs Commuters

The couple are not commuters. There is a liveliness about them that tells you they do not do this every day. In comparison, the commuter is tired, shut off.

Stranded

I took a picture about a year ago, on the day when there was really heavy snow and all the trains were cancelled. I remember arriving at Victoria to see the entire concourse full of people staring at a blank board with the word cancelled all over it. It was like a religious event. Everyone was in the same situation and there was a huge sense of frustration. The picture I took was just a crowd of people staring at the blank board wearing hats, gloves, talking on phones. Wondering if they'd ever get home.

It's an interesting aspect. Commuting, it doesn't feel like travel, normally. It's just routine movement between dreary spaces. But when something goes wrong, it feels like a journey and it takes on a special significance.

I'm thinking of doing a painting of the scene, maybe in black and white. Today, though, I made a lino print of the picture, slightly abstract, the edges of the characters slightly deformed. I'm thinking of printing it a grey colour then cutting more away, if necessary.

First pull on the press:

Second attempt

This time, I worked with a thinner, more turped-down underlayer, made sure it was fully blended, and that the grey tones on the face were accurate. It felt a bit flat to me and half-way through I lifted up the canvas and realised that the brush-strokes were a bit careless, so I took it to the easel and this made a big difference.

Because I was working at a relatively small scale for me, my brush strokes were sometimes like dabs - and this felt neater. I mixed black and white on the palette to get the right tone, rather than on the canvas (which is what I often have done).

Going Wrong

My first attempt at painting a commuter went wrong. The tones are inaccurate. When laying down the undercolour I didn't focus enough on the tones. As a result, the flesh doesn't feel right to me. The blending is poor, too, and up close, the brush marks are pretty shabby. I decided to bin this first attempt and start again.

I'm going to work from home this morning, and go more slowly. Here is the pencil sketch on the grid.

A Station Cafe

Young man with a new-born baby in a cafe on the station – basically a noisy waiting room with hot milk froth. In my picture the man looks child-like, too; tired, but expectant. As if he is buzzing after a night at the hospital.

The other woman in the foreground helps to frame the picture. I liked playing with colour and black-and-white in the composition. It's not a complicated point. Colour is alive, it stands for all things that stand apart from the world of trains and commuting.

Studio

First day in the studio. I'm really pleased with it. There is a good-sized window.

I printed out a picture I'd taken earlier in the week of an old man staring out of a train window.

He seems to be staring out at a colour blur. It made me realise something obvious, that when you look out of a train window, your eye sees what is there as a continuous view. But in a photograph, the view is blurred to a horizontal rush of colour.

I created a grid which I find helps me to place the image on the canvas. I started with a grey-white underlayer, after I had sketched out the face.

I want the inside of the train to be monotone and the outside world to be colour.

Black and white seems best to represent the tired quality of routine inside the carriage. Hard lines etched in the face, hard surfaces, coldness, an exhausted light.

In contrast, what's outside seems alive, warm and vivid - but it also seems to lack a firm shape, as if it is both beautiful and unreal.

Space Invaders

Sitting opposite me today. A young guy. Initially, he had his rucksack on the chair next to the window until a middle-aged woman asked him politely to move it. Space is important in trains. Jealously guarded, fought over. A silent and bitter struggle.

Two big men working on small laptops. I like the idea of the world rushing past them in a blur. This is why, in my picture, I have kept the colour only in the window.

Woman takes out her powder and applies to her face discreetly, facing the window. There is no personal space on trains. Someone is watching you!

Straight Lines

Train stations can seem lonely places, at times. So many straight lines running in parallel, in different directions. We are close to one another, but we don't connect. We only speak to say sorry if we bump into someone.

Way home

Went to the Tate Modern today. Thought Richter exhibition was on, but got the wrong date. I looked round and made some notes. I find that most works I'm interested in are mixed media and have slightly disjointed elements. I have written a list of artists that I think could connect to my studio work. Will look into more.

Saw a poster (below) of a smeary Richter and thought of a train rushing past. I think I could make the same effect.

On the train

It's lucky I have to commute to get to college. I can start work right away.

I am taking pictures secretly of the commuters opposite me: a middle-aged man keeps yawning as he plays on his phone.. Another military-type is next to him, head resting on the window; older, seemingly worn out. Unusually, he's got no phone with him, just an newspaper crossword which he works at closely, peering over his big glasses.

The man next to him keeps casually peering over at the crossword. He is not particulary interested, but he can't seem to focus on anything. He keeps putting his phone away, then getting it out, closing his eyes, opening them...thinking of the day ahead, maybe... I have the impression that he's very tired.

The important thing, right away, is to get a feel for the people. I wonder about their lives. All the important details of their lives are elsewhere. Here, you see just a surface. There should be a sign over their heads: MIND THE GAP. So much is missing - but on the other hand, this is such a large part of their lives. I need to think about how to deal with this.

One thing I have enjoyed doing in the past is to create a traditional painting from a photo of a very modern scene. The picture above appeals to me.

But then again, I think of Gerhard Richter and his blurred images...

Oliver Reed

Must see if I can get hold of a copy of Oliver Reed's photo of a girl writing a text message on a train. I saw it at the 2011 NPG Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition. Just the right kind of 'secret' snap. Here it is! A Text Message. I like the way the girl sits in her own space, completely absorbed in what she is doing.

What comes to mind

Gerhard Richter. The blurred images. They look like photos from a moving train.

Thinking of taking pictures of commuters, tired, on the way to or from office.

Remember a photograph by Doug Dubois, of his commuter father. It looks like an oil painting.

Idea

Thinking about first project. Everything I have been interested in up to now has been to do with everyday life. Ordinary things. So thinking about a theme like commuting, for example. Maybe Back & Forth or Coming & Going. Or just Commute.

First Ever Blog

First day. Never written a blog before. Usually prefer diary.