One thing I really love about having screen prints made of my work is how the final result is never exactly how I imagined it would be before we began. The ‘we’ here is critical. This is a collaborative process between me and Ali of Manson’s Press who prints all of my limited editions. I see it as little like the relationship between a musician and producer: I, the artist, arrive with my ‘song’, to sit and work in Ali’s studio to add texture and depth using all of the technical wizardry of his ‘mixing desk’ until we arrive at a catchy new record.
I’m going to run you through how we produced my latest hit, the new fifth edition of Fail We May Sail We Must, to illustrate this point.
It starts with me messing around on photoshop trying to figure out a rough new colour combination for this design. You might think that five editions in this is starting to become a chore, but wonder of colour combinations is never ending. There are always new ones waiting discovered that will surprise you. And with each edition the overall blend and tone of the palette we use is improving because each time I learn something new about how they work within the same framework. Every new version is kind of remix of last year’s track.
The big lesson from the fourth edition was how nice a lilac looked in place of the original blue. It somehow lifted the clouds in the top half of the design and played much more happily with the green of the foliage.
So the lilac was staying for this year. What I felt could change was the yellow. In the gold leaf version of this print the gold provides a lovely rich yellow tone, so maybe it could live without it. And I knew from the second edition of this print how well a pink worked in its place. The question then was: would lilac, pink and green play nicely together? And the answer according to what I can see on the screen in photoshop is probably yes.
I send this mockup off to Ali and we set a date for me to come into his studio and mix the colours in person. He had some notes on my selection. He thought the green was too dark. And he also thought we should push all the colours to a much lighter tone, more pastel than we’ve gone before. My first instinct is that will make it too soft, that the print will lack punch, but he seemed convinced this was the path to go down.
At this critical juncture I make the decision to trust my producer and go with his route. It’s a difficult part of any collaborative creative process to know when to put your ego to one side and follow someone else’s vision. But after years of working together, building trust and a friendship I’ve got a good sense of when to follow and when to lead in our creative relationship. It was time to follow, and I’m very glad that I did.
With the overall direction now agreed I watch Ali get to work. He cracks open big ten litre tubs base ink and pours some into a three glass jars. Then he pulls out pots of pure pigment. Space dust colour, like sherbert, and adds it to the base inks. More jars come down off his shelves of colours he has mixed before and little bits are added to our new potions.
While he’s doing all this I stand there and moan about loads of stuff that has nothing to do with what we’re doing, unloading my troubles to a friend. He moans back. I won’t reveal the details but its usually about clients, or instagram, or trying to balance being a father and an artist, or the Tories. While the colours are mixed catharsis for our shared frustrations is felt.
Twenty minutes of bitching later and we’ve got a trio of nice looking colours in the pot. Now its time to see how they look on paper together. Ali prints little oblongs of each one onto a sheet of scrap for us to inspect. They look good, different to how they looked in their pots though, much darker somehow. Ali goes back to his potion mixing, adding more white, or more base to drop the opacity, or a little pearlescent powder to give some sheen. I keep on bitching while he works.
More little oblongs are added to the scrap until we’ve got the makings of a pleasing abstract painting that Joseph Albers would be proud of. The final colours look really light to me, I like it but I’m still not sure it will work. But the creation of any good artwork requires a leap of faith from the artist. I leave Ali’s print dungeon (which is in the basement of his home) with hope in my heart for a good result. Its exciting, the unknown of what will come out.
Over the next few days Ali does the hard yards of actually printing the edition. Each colour is drawn through a silkscreen mesh one by one. Sixty times for each colour, then the black, that’s two hundred and forty row pulls with a squeegee. Knackering. He sends me photos on Whatsapp as it comes together. It looks great, he’s still very excited. I’m excited as well but I know I need to see them in person to really see what they’re like. Phone photos and video never do these prints justice. Nor even do photos with my Sony A7III loaded up with a Zeiss lens that costs a grand and a proper lighting setup.
Its all about what my eyes actually see in reality when I look at these prints in a decent level of natural light. Thats the only colour assessment that I can truly trust. And that’s the only one you should ever trust as well. Every screen is calibrated differently. Colours will look slightly different on your laptop compared to your phone or your partners phone or your work computer. The photos on my product pages, on here and on my instagram are only ever a best attempt to convey what these prints really look like in the flesh.
Colour can be broken down into a highly intellectualised science but first and foremost it is a feeling. And the feeling I got when I saw this latest edition of my best selling print was fantastic. The pastel tones sing in perfect harmony with the deep black of the outline. Pink, lilac and green worked beautifully.
Now its time for me to actually help Ali out. He prints one more layer of gold size, which is special type of varnish, and then we get down to the hard work of laying down 23.5 carat gold leaf along the outlines of the ones that getting gilded. This takes two people with years of experience handling gold leaf a full day with complete focus to get all thirty prints finished. Plenty of time for more bitching to get done while we work.
At this point I still need to maintain a level of critical detachment. I’m focused on executing the gild as efficiently and flawlessly as possible, and I’m simultaneously trying to film and photograph it on my phone to have content to help promote it. That doesn’t leave much room for feeling.
By the end of the day over six hundred pounds worth of gold leaf is either on the prints or has settled in tiny flecks around Ali’s print dungeon, now feeling like more of a grotto with all that gold. I take two prints back with me to photograph in my studio and leave the rest for Ali to trim and finish for me to collect in a week or so.
The next day I begin the difficult task of photographing these beauties. I need to make sure the light falls in a perfectly uneven, yet even finish to illustrate how the gold reflects. The shots need to be in sharp focus, with the correct white balance and in the right format. Then I need to open up the selected shots in Photoshop and correct each colour individually to make sure that what I see on the screen matches as closely as possible with what I see in the flesh. Once again a strict critical detachment needs to be maintained.
It was only on Thursday this week when I spent another full day in the company of these prints that I could really sink into the feeling of them. The time had come to package, roll and post all of your orders from the launch last week. This is a repetitive task. Wiping away any little flecks of loose gold, signing, numbering and wrapping each print in tissue paper ready for its journey can be a drag. But it was also the first time I got to really enjoy how this new fifth edition feels in the flesh, in the diffuse daylight of my studio’s big North facing window.
Every print I pulled over from the stack to prep and roll looked stunning. The colours all jump out at once, they sing together in perfect harmony. The black key-line that defines the overall shape of the design has never looked so clear and readable because the colours are softer. The overall impression is so strong, five editions in and this is my favourite.
What I feel in that moment is a sense of pride. People I’ve never met from all over the world have sent me hundreds of pounds over the internet in their own leap of faith, hoping that what I will provide them with will be worth it. And I know now, as I roll each one, that when they open them up their tubes and peel back the tissue paper they will have their own moment of wonder as the feeling of this chorus of colour hits their eyes for the first time for real.
Half of the thirty golf leaf edition have now sold, so don’t wait too long if you’re interested in one of these.