Embarking on the new skill of screen printing in Adam Green’s February evening class at Ochre Print Studio has been an exciting and delightful experience. The studio has excellent screen printing facilities with large vacuum beds and plenty of drying rack space.
The results produced after six weeks by everybody in the beginners group were extraordinary and a credit to Adam’s calm teaching approach. I was so taken with stenciling, mark resist and mono printing that somehow I managed to avoid the trickier challenge of registering overlays. However, there are so many decent reference books and helpful printmakers at Ochre studios that I am hoping to get to grips with this shortly. With some trepidation, I decided to exhibit some of my screen prints at the Oxmarket Printmakers’ Exhibition, Chichester, where they are on show until the 25th March, alongside work by other Ochre members, Anne Henry and Jennie Hook (and possibly other members with whose names I am not yet familiar!).
If you are in Chichester, it is worth visiting the Pop! Art in a Changing Britain exhibition at Pallant House Galleries where there are plenty of rarely exhibited examples of 1960’s and 70’s screen prints by R.B. Kitaj, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and Patrick Caulfield alongside etchings by David Hockney.
Those of you who are familiar with my work will have seen that the human figure often features in my prints. I attend regular life drawing sessions to improve my observational and drawing skills. While most of my drawings are put to one side, some occasionally make it onto a print plate, often in an abstracted form. I recently had the opportunity of participating in a week of life painting of long poses so, to end this blog item, here are the results of recent short and longer poses which might end up on a print produced at Ochre.
