THE MAKING OF TANGO

a few years ago i played with silkscreen at Makers’ Mill. i traced a doodle of richard’s. silky curvy fluid arcing lines. they end in pendulous teardrop shapes. many with dots. snakes? squiggles? eyes? ali sees breasts. this start leapfrogged me into a number of directions. layering and overprinting of the screenprints. hand coloring to emphasize spatial changes. printing the curving linear drawing onto a grid of colors (paint samples, another found colorful surface). transparencies and foggy obfuscations.

i guess i should cite R as co-author. co-artist. collaborator. thanks, R!

printmaking is fun. this kind of experimentation is what it’s all about. haha that statement is in direct opposition to my 1998 self.

Tango Trio above. Tango Violaceous below.

tango: that which is held

i imported the drawing into photoshop and cut and played there. digital play is certainly a theme. i cut the drawing into vinyl and moved into paint recreating the photoshop experiment back in the IRL realm. acrylic plus extremely crisp hard-edged black vinyl for the lines. cutting and reassembling the grid so that the lines disconnect and reconnect. interruptions and ruptures. chance collisions and connections. overlaps and transparencies. some hardcore printmaking and collage ideas in terms of interplay of layers and parts. repetition. because of the overlap and interaction, especially in the multi-layered repeated prints, i think of tango as a partnership in tension. metaphor alert!

PHOTOSHOP REFERENCE

this grid is a photoshop experiment with content-aware fills. screws up the image in the most delicious ways. this was part of the process to get back out to the real world of material and paint.

Completed Tango: That Which Is Held. oops forgot to photo before framing.