Linocutting

 Since seeing 'Eat your heart out' and some of the work at the Saatchi, I've been really interested in hearts, I was going to do a multiple colour linocut, but It is reasonably big and is taking time to plan out, so in the meantime I started doing this small, but highly detailed linocut.

I wanted to look at the heart as a symbol. Valentines day is coming up and hearts are everywhere, but the hearts we see on the shop shelves are a far cry from what a heart actually looks like.

I plan to make cards using my anatomically correct heart symbol in the place of the usual commercial heart.

I'm sure I will take this project further, but am so far pleased with the results.

I'm going to head into the print studio on Tuesday to print the final editions before moving the project along to creating the cards and beyond.

 

Beginning stages of cutting

 

 

Test prints 

 

Saatchi Gallery.

I recently visited the Saatchi and saw their latest exhibition: Gaiety is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union. I went with Olga who is Ukrainian, which shed a different light to if i'd been on my own, as she recognised places and translated Russian text in some of the images.

There was a large variety of work, so I took pictures of the things I liked and tried to capture as much as possible.

Meanwhile II

 I saw the exhibition 'Meanwhile II: Subtle interventions by: Susan Collis, Oona Culley, Daniel Eatock, Cadi Froehlich, Janne Malmros, Trevor H. Smith' a while ago now, whilst working at the Hartley Library, University of Southampton. There is a gallery on level 4, which regularly hosts either art or history exhibitions.

You'll have to forgive the images as they could be much better, however I think my camera battery for the light meter has run out and I just didn't notice, and relied on it a bit too much. This exhibition was hard to capture anyway, as most of the pieces were light in colour and some contained barely-there details.

 

 

I think what I took away from this, was that there can be a kind of subtlety that is very appropriate in relation to some areas of artwork. The exhibition was based around the themes of removal, omission, deconstruction. Sometimes what the work was about was the object which was missing or no longer present. Coffee/tea mug stains on a table are reminiscent of times past and conversations lost, words are barely impressed upon paper, and drawings are made by absent marks or gaps. 

Showing absence in work is something which is hard to do, so the variety of ways in which this had been done was inspiring.