Monday 24 March 2008

Daniel is Swept Away

I’ve always been fascinated by Japanese prints or Ukiyo-e, especially the highly stylized imagery used to portray water.

Trust Daniel to accidentally fall into a Ukiyo-e torrent and get swept away, only to finally succumb to the turbulent currents… or does he?

Before


After

I originally designed the three silk cuttings to explore the patterns and complexity of portraying the water and Daniel simply fell in. Then I felt sorry for him and devised his escape, but that never got beyond the sketch stage.

These three silk paper cuttings have yet to be finished and are still held together by ‘spars’ of silk which I’ll cut off before mounting the work. I laid the work on white silk to take the photos so there are shadows.

3 comments:

Gillian Mowbray said...

Now that's brilliant and it does indeed conjure up the style of those wonderful Japanese prints.

I'm fascinated by the fact that you've left those spurs to maintain strength before positioning. So clever.

I'm just getting back into lino-cutting and these would make great lino cut prints!

Patrick said...

Great pieces. I think my favorite is the third. I really like how Daniel and the waves are interacting in that one. How in the world do you mount these anyway? Glue?

Tim Budden said...

Patrick
The mounting is always a problem. The best method I have found is to use a spray mount glue. I lightly spray the reverse several times but I have to let each coat dry fully before spraying on the next one. When the whole thing is dry and just slightly tacky I lay it out on the mounting material then use lowest silk setting on an iron and by ironing it the glue melts and bonds the two together. Sounds simple but it can be deeply frustrating like the day the wind blew a piece and it stuck to my foot. Or when I wrongly spray glued the silk side and destroyed a piece - I cried over a bottle of wine on that one!