I find that going to galleries and exhibitions helps me sort through the thoughts in my head, but sometimes these visits throw up more ideas, and these make life more busy and confusing. For example, Paris Montparnasse, by Andreas Gursky. Neverland by Damien Hirst. The scale of both works is impressive. In Gursky's work, it was strange being at eye-level, peering into rooms, seeing people staring out from some of them. Hirst's work was like a huge kaleidoscope and I liked the way that the mirrors distorted the size and shape of the drugs in this vast medicine cabinet.
I've recently been working on two prints one suicide print which is interesting because I've never attempted it before and it has always stroked me as being a hard job and difficult to get my head round.
The yellow print (first colour of suicide print):
Preparing the blue for the second part of the suicide print:
The blue on the yellow:
Another print I'm working on is in black-and-white, of the inside of a tube train, from a picture. I am thinking of incorporating a picture in the print. I guess working from Patrick Caulfield.
I guess with the suicide print it's more about appearance and how it ends up that I'm interested in; I like seeing what can be done on a one-way journey.
(It is called a suicide print because it is a one-way journey; once you have cut out lino for a colour, that's it...you can't go back. You can see above by comparing the yellow with the blue. At the end, there's hardly anything left of the lino. All the detail is on the print.)
With the monoprint and feel I can show some meaning and work with that, cutting it up, maybe working with its shape more...
