I feel like I've been on quite the journey with this print! It's been frustrating at times, but it's actually been a great learning experience. Having freed myself from the pressure of having to 'perform' and produce a print that was beautiful, and sensitive, and funny, and epitomised my art practice, my instinct was to fall back on humour. Funny prints sell well, and there's a lot of my sort of pithy humour out there.
However, remembering my manifesto, my focus shifted to something a bit more authentic. I thought I could draw on the space-filling pattern I did for the book illustration, plus the skull I was messing around with before. I wanted to share something around finding joy in life, before it's too late, so I conceived something a bit like a memento mori - sort of like a grave rubbing:
I quite liked the 'poster' style, and I quite liked the slight dark ambiguity in the proclamation - clearly it could be read as 'seize the joy in life, before it's too late' but it could also be interpreted in darker ways e.g. seize the joy of death. However, sharing it with a few friends, I got the vibe that they didn't like it. They didn't like the ambiguity and double meaning. I also began to worry I might have inadvertently tapped into a bit of 'nazi-aesthetic' with skull-on-a-poster vibe...
Having seen some blind-embossing on instagram, and having studies the prints on the walls of various institutions I happened to be in, I decided to go for something radically simpler, and lean-into the computer art connection, almost bringing me in a full circle. Keeping the set-up above, I moved eventually to:
Which I am really pleased with. I did experiment quite a lot with e.g. different sizes of circle, shading behind vs no shading, different arrangements of whether the lines cross the circle edge, etc etc One particularly tricky decision was whether to include a slight warp to the positions - this code was implemented originally but turned out to be switched off. I liked the more organic nature of the warped image (whereby the positions of the lines above are pushed around slightly using perlin noise), but I also liked the cool precision of the un-distorted image. Eventually I implemented a very slight distortion, which I think brings it to life.
The aim is for the centre circle to be gilded, but the prints only came back today, the day before the deadline for submitting the thumbnail for Not Just A Shop. However, I was able to reuse some code from a previous experiment, to create a mock-up of the gilded poster in Blender:
It's not great, but not awful either! Hopefully it will give people a decent taste of the real thing...
Having got the prints today, I now have to do the gilding for real... I hope I don't mess it up!
Funnily enough, having refreshed my interest in computer art, I read this very interesting article about computer art pioneer, Lillian Schwartz, in Art Forum.
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