I’m sharing some artwork from my school and college years. See all the posts here.
In third year we were pretty much let loose to do whatever we wanted, except that doing anything other than straight printmaking was heavily discouraged. Some of us found that very frustrating, especially me as I was enjoying experimenting with collage, rubber stamps, photography and computer-generated patterns along with my printmaking. I just found these images from sketchbook scans and they go with the collagraph last week. They’re all based on photobooth photos.
And yes I am wearing a PJ & Duncan t-shirt. My whole thing was about fandom and growing up. I used a lot of kids craft supplies and toys. The above is a sketch for a big piece I did, which my tutors refused to put in the class exhibition in town because it was “too pink”. If I’d kept the colours above I bet it wouldn’t have been rejected for being too blue. I don’t seem to have any of my finished big pieces from this year, so this post is a bit random, sorry!
This isn’t a great screenprint (I was really terrible at registration), but it’s the only finished example I have of my other favourite thing at the time, photocopier art. I spent hours with the art school’s only photocopier blowing things up and copying them over and over again. I used to tear off bits of the billboards on the walk home and enlarge the dot patterns, which I used on the fish here.
It amazes me, looking back on this, how much time I spent making repeat patterns. This one is completely mental.
These are some of my final prints – collagraphs on collaged backgrounds.
And my proper final piece was a massive collagraph based on this little drawing/collage.
Ending on things I don’t have is a bit of a letdown, but I also finished art school there and graduated instead of going back for my honours year. I was just too disillusioned and frustrated with how we were being taught and again, wanting to do my own thing. With hindsight, I was too young and even a few years later I would have got so much more out of it.
There’s more stuff in my Flickr album that I didn’t really have anything to say about – that’s our cat, Miggy. If you’re not too bored, I’m going to continue this series for a few more posts, because obviously I didn’t stop making art, and I can bring it up to when I started Asking For Trouble.