This series is an extension of an automatic painting series that I was working on for two years.
I wasn’t selective about materials I was using - any paint, any paper or paintbrush was great. So one beautiful day, some glossy paper and a hard bristle paintbrush were at hand, which happened to be the perfect combo to get graphical strokes that looked almost like drawings.
I guess because of the way it looked, it blurred boundaries in my head between different techniques. I went like, ‘oh! I could ‘translate’ painting to drawing - or! to linocut!’ And so I did.
I got questions: why? Why would you burden yourself with so much work carving abstract details when you already have the painting? And I couldn’t answer.
But I’m glad I did what I did, because it didn’t end with your casual print. I was playing around with printmaking too - again, not being selective with materials and not playing by the rules of ‘how to’. And it did translate into something completely different, just like with Google Translate.
I used fragments or halves of linocuts to achieve open compositions, and printed with basically coloured water instead of full-opacity paint to keep it light, so to speak. These things combined echo motion as a theme the best.
So we did go far with linos, but not too far to lose the dynamics.

 

2023