I've been a bit confused since my AL tutorial with Natasha Kidd. I feel that what she said was very useful and I agreed with her.
She said that the good thing about my prints was, that I had my own style going but, on the other hand, the fact that there was a border around them made them seem contrived. I don't exactly know what she meant by that, but they do feel a little bit limited, to me.
I need to branch out a bit, experiment with the prints....I feel I can do this. At the same time, I need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. I don't just want to chop everything up in pieces.
My original thinking with prints was, that I needed to try something different. I had mainly focused on oil painting and portraits and wanted to be more adventurous. I wanted to experiment. But it's hard to start in a new medium, especially one that has so many technical restrictions.
I also wanted to link this piece with my oil painting of two people on the train.The sense of the blur and movement of the train going past, with glimpses of the people in the windows.
With hindsight, I could maybe have achieved this effect in a different way with a linoprint. But this medium is slow, it's unforgiving and, as I said, it is completely new to me, and it's a steep learning curve.
I needed to get some breathing space, so I tried something a little bit different.
I photocopied the two tube prints and created a blur by making the picture wider each time. I found that photocopying the photos in black and white created a rough, almost mysterious effect, in keeping with the original style of the photos I had taken.
