05/12/2016 - PRINT PREP - CHINESE ART

For our first print workshop I was assigned to screen printing wherein we had to create a two colour screen print with text. I tried to think of a fresh way to incorporate image, concept and text without my final product appearing as some sort of tumblr blog image or internet graphic and thought of the pictorial way that text and image is combined in traditional Chinese visual arts. I also thought Chinese letter forms were a more interesting way to convey a phrase or meaning without having plain text written across the piece.


I wanted to try to find a traditional Chinese quote which not only could be visually represented in a way which matched my artistic direction but also holds reverence with modern values and society to keep my work identifiable so started reading a book called Chinese Proverbs and Popular Sayings by Qin Xue and Larry Herzberg. I found the most inspiration in the section on animal related parables and metaphor, as it is a key artistic interest of mine how people are able to identify with personified aspects of nature or animals, such as why people occasionally get upset when a human character dies in a film yet if a significant dog or cat passes people are much more deeply touched.

The quote I finally settled on was "from a crow's nest, a phoenix may emerge" or "老鸹窝里出凤凰" which speaks of rising above the circumstances of your birth and becoming exceptional despite humble beginnings, not only because I thought it was relatable, a positive message but also because birds regularly appear in Chinese art and I thought the colours of a phoenix worked with the predominantly red hues of traditional Chinese pigments.

Having researched the typical styles in Chinese art I found the shui-mo ink and wash method most interesting, not only because of the aesthetic but also due to some of the unique tools and techniques traditionally used to create it, such as ink sticks. It also continued my exploration of the Four Treasures/Arts of the Chinese elite. So I began by creating my source image for the print from scratch using watered down acrylic to resemble ink and brush stroke.

I created the crow perching on the edge of it's nest looking at an oversized egg which I would colour orange in the screen print as an alternative way of demonstrating my quote. I also liked this way of presenting my piece as it hinted at an unexplored narrative yet to unfold upon the egg's hatching. I think I captured a blend of both my own style and derivatives from shui-mo effectively in this quick painting, aquiring gestural elements normally missing in my work yet still brought the key focal feautures such as the eye, beak and claws into sharpest emphasis as I often do.

I was aware that I would need to condense these tonal values down into flat black to ensure they would appear correctly on the screen, so I chose to turn this painting into a half tone image. I thought this might create an interesting mashup of styles and eras, between traditionalist, oriental China and the consumerist, industrial, mass production values of today, as half tone are the building blocks from which all modern mechanical printing was developed.

 I also created a second colour layer to mark the unhatched egg out as unique from the crow, adding a stock photo of smoke and making this layer half tone also.