About Amplifier
Amplifier / EPC is edition #16 for my Experimental Print Club. The piece revisits an archived drawing that has been loitering in my imagination for quite a few years, but hadn’t quite managed to surface until now.
The original studies take on the idea of a modulating series of concave and convex forms, which are in themselves rippled with a further waveform, rendered in glazed and tinted colours, that appear almost like scales on a fish. I’m not sure why I didn’t resolve the drawing originally, but it may simply be that I put it down for a while, and never came back to it. That tends to happens quite a lot, and has led to a significant archive of incomplete works.
There’s a great Mark Wallinger piece that I saw at his dealer Anthony Reynolds’ gallery on Gt Marlborough Street, before it closed. By coincidence, Great Marlborough Street was also the street where I rented my first studio, 2000 sq ft next to Liberty’s of London, maybe around 1995 I think, when affordable spaces in central London were still readily available.
Wallinger had set up a projection of a seminal movie scene, the crucifixion as depicted in The Robe, but he’d blacked out almost the entire image. All that remained was a thin line of pixels around the edge of the screen. Amazingly you could still understand exactly what was going on, in part perhaps because the film is so iconic.
It’s always been a thought in my mind therefore, to experiment with the idea of over printing, or in some way knocking out, the majority of an image, to see how and if it continues to function. The idea is well known to graphic designers, who will knock out the top or bottom half of a line of text, which often remains surprisingly legible, or in the case of Jonathan Barnbrook, over ink an image of David Bowie, on his highly regarded artwork for The Next Day.
So with all that in mind, I worked up a flat grey overprint that knocks out most of the original image on the right hand side of the work, leaving just the horizontal lines that allude to the idea of a musical stave and a few of the concave and convex forms that the image is built from, presenting a starkly minimal contrast to the maximalist left hand side with its almost baroque feel.
There’s an interplay between the texture of the 2 parts too. One half is ultra matt, the other a glossy metallic. It’s fair to say that laying the two parts down with a tight join and squared up within the deboss presented a significant challenge at the print finishing stage, and more than one edition ended up in the bin! An enjoyable few days work nonetheless.
Amplifier, in the studio
Print Club blog, November 30th, 2020
…I’ve rather fallen in love with the idea of making a platinum print. There’s a depth of history there that seems almost irresistible to explore, and I’ve discovered a UK based studio where they still make them. The original process dates back to the early days of photography, but ultimately lost out to the all consuming silver halide process. The platinum print retains a strong fan base, and is, apparently, the only print process that remains non-fugitive, or in other words doesn’t ever fade, due to the nature of the way the chemicals mark the paper. Ultimately of course it’s about the aesthetic, which is a beautiful soft grey affair, you’ll no doubt have seen them, old Victorian photos, often with rather stern looking families posing in their finery. I’ll look forward to letting you know how I get on with it. If it proves impossible, maybe there’ll be other monochrome routes to explore for the image I have in mind. We’ll see…
Text from the Print Club blog, November 30th, 2020
Coming home from the marshes, Peter Henry Emerson, Platinum print 1886
About the Print Club
If you’d like to receive three or four exclusive new editions in the post each year, alongside personal news and views from the studio, and invitations to shows and fairs, please do consider becoming a member of my Experimental Print Club. You can join or leave the club at any time, with absolutely no obligation to stay any longer than you want to.
New works are sent out somewhat sporadically throughout the year, often in line with the changing seasons. Each piece is unique, exclusive, and only available on the day it’s editioned, the size of the edition being determined by the number of members on the day.
I hope the club presents a more personal and intriguing way to connect with the studio, by creating a platform for collecting engaging new works for your home. The club is hosted online here, and I send out fairly regular blog posts and emails about the work too. I’d like to think that it’s an interesting proposition!
Membership is currently priced at £36 per month inc. UK delivery, or £42 for an international address.
Associated works
