These paintings date from 1998 and 2000. The first one is in the collection of the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea, gifted from the late Clive Graham. The second is in a private collection.
…
…
Daily Archives: June 17, 2012
envelopes from the past
…
We’ve acquired a new piece of kit in order to be able to transfer my old transparency archive to digital images. In the past we’ve always had image transfer done professionally, but with the aid of this Epson we can slowly work our way through the old ring-binders full of slides. (And there are more of them than I want to think about!) Today I found these images from a ‘Postal Art’ exhibition that the late Lizzie Organ did at the Kilvert Gallery in 1996. (I apologise that the images are a tad blurred. The magic Epson can’t correct a transparency that’s out-of-focus, and ‘image-sharpening’ on i-photo can only do so much.) In addition to a fold-flat toy theatre for the exhibition, I submitted the envelopes illustrated here. They were stamped and franked and sent through the postal system to the gallery. There they were slipped into clip-frames, exhibited and sold.
I produced them by various means. I made the envelopes from thin Japanese paper given to me by Nicolas McDowall. I recall the images printed onto them were made by various means: rubber-stamps, transfer-printing using nail-varnish remover, and tiny lino-blocks of a glove, a tree, a dove and the frame to the stamp, that I brushed with bleach before printing onto water-soluble black ink. I wrote the addresses with a mapping-pen dipped in bleach. It was my first attempt at any kind of printing, and I crammed in every technique at my disposal. Reacquainting myself with the images all these years on, I’m rather pleased with them. They look like they’d contain letters from a land where the Brothers Grimm would be quite at home. The reality was more prosaic, as they held the delivery notes to the gallery which were removed before clip-framing. I wonder where the envelopes are now.
