I have been asked to refocus this blog and address issues more relevant to printmaking and publishing. When thinking of printmaking one cannot help but think immediately of ‘images’. Indeed we think of ‘images’ when we think of anything, for what is everything that we see but ‘images’? Sometimes I feel like I see so many images day to day that my eyes will start to bleed, a condition called Subconjunctival Haemorrhage.
There are, of course, different ways of absorbing images. Images can be divided into two groups, ones you choose to look at and ones you are forced to look at. Given the choice, you would generally choose to avoid looking at images of mutilated animals, but someone could easily make you look at these images using force.
Sometimes you can see an image from far away and perceive it one way, only to approach it and perceive it another way entirely. You can see a poster on a wall depicting what looks from a distance to be a dog wearing a baseball cap, only to wander closer and find it is an image of a dead dog, and there is no baseball cap. Similarly, the nuts and bolts of an image can affect your judgement of the image as a whole. It is one thing to see an image of a circle, but your impression will be very different if that circle is made out of erections.
A printmaker works in images, they are his bread and butter, the same way pheasants are a pheasant breeder’s bread and butter, the same way crime is a gangster’s bread and butter. If there is one crime that a printmaker can commit, it is failing to take in every single image of the world – good or bad, pretty or grotesque – in their entirety.
