A Walk to the Studio

II : Linoleum
screenprint
edition of 50
paper size 100 x 72 cm
1976-7

III : Matching Colours Struck by Heatwave
screenprint edition of 50
image size 84.3 x 58.4 cm
paper size 100 x 72 cm
1976-7

IV : A Grammar of Ornament
screenprint
edition of 50
image size 84.3 x 58.4 cm
paper size 100 x 72 cm
1976-7

V : Eleven Elements of Violence
screenprint
edition of 50
image size 80.2 x 59 cm
paper size 100 x 72 cm>
1976-7

VI : Art on the Road
screenprint
edition of 50
image size 81 x 60 cm
paper size 100 x 72 cm
1976-7

The first in the series shows all the stopcock-box-lids between my house in Grove Park SE5 and my studio in Talfourd Road SE15. Their skull like shape aided by the degradations of time and wear link them with masks and the classical Memento Mori images, the ikons of mortality.

From the initial 35mm black and white photographs of the lids which I took in May 76, the making of the print occupied three months. It  involved blowing these photos up and aligning the bromide enlargements on to a single sheet which itself was then rephotographed in various line and tone separations: the original bromides were then coloured by me with photographic tinting inks according to colour notes I had made in the street.

From these colours and from other pencil indications the printer, Bernard Cook, was able to capture all the subtle time, weather and accident wrought variations in the sixty-four-stopcock-box-lids using twenty-six colours (plus an overall colour and the printed text).

The second image consists of a transcription of a remarkable piece of linoleum which is one of the richest treasures I have found on my walk, with an extensive text which attempts to communicate the excitement such a discovery gives me. 

The third print is a curious record of the long drought which stretched through the whole summer of 1976. Two types of matchbox, each originating from behind the iron curtain, show in progressive stages the bleaching of the beautiful purple and deep blue papers used in the making of the trays of the boxes. Usually these thrown away items are dissipated by the rain: however, in that year they stayed exposed on the streets of Peckham.

The fourth of the prints is a tribute to a great Welshman, Owen Jones, whose monumental tome The Grammar of Ornament is (for those with strength enough to lift it down from the shelf) a treasure house of design and motif as well as a masterpiece of book production. Borrowing his format I have made an assemblage of the various pieces of ornamental paper that litter these streets in 1976 and have tried to treat them with the care that would have been their automatic right were they the sweet-wrappers of Babylon or the fancy paper-bags of Troy. These various unconsidered trifles are presented in their natural sizes and surrounded by a decorative border which is the much enlarged back of a humdrum playing card: although one of the cheapest kinds of plasticated card, the deliberate intricacy is still delicate and well-drawn on this scale.

The first five of these images have texts printed in such a way as to be scarcely legible: the texts are all brought together in readable form in a final exegetic piece which includes a map of the walk itself. The reason for the invisible texts is an old need of mine to put all the source material into the picture to preempt and forestall art history, coupled with a recent realisation that this in the past has merely stopped people looking at the actual thing depicted.

For the fifth work in the suite I put together images of implied anger and violence; principally a cigarette packet scarred with magnificent and furious drawing, done perhaps by someone driven to miniature and confined brutality as he (or she) waited for that feared and/or needed phone call. Perhaps the resemblance to the map of Australia in the large mark is mere coincidence. The other signs I have used are also partly metaphorical since the spirit of spite plays little part in the functional nailholes and accidental tears which a piece of corrugated iron suffers in its shifting history as a shield to various building sites. Perhaps it is because they so often act as the veil of vandalism, and their rusted, cut and perforated selves are mere allegorical masks of what so often goes on behind them, that I find their stigmatized surfaces so potent. On a more celebratory note I have used the letters ER from a piece of  graffiti saying in full 'we are the bovver boys, dave and fred' as a reminder that this portfolio was finished in Jubilee Year.

From Works  and Texts 1992, pp 131 – 135