Saturday, May 19, 2012

Excerpts

This is a series of screen prints I did for a group show last year. My goal was to reproduce old, weathered paperback pages, but invent the content myself. All text and graphics are my own, though heavily inspired by both genre tropes and specific authors or styles.

Each print consists of 7 layers: 5 very-transparent beige/yellow ones for the pages; one for the coloured page edges; the text/illustrations were printed last, in a slightly-transparent dark grey.

I'm really happy with how they turned out, but have mixed feelings about how they're viewed; many people assume that the content was found and that my contribution was purely in the technical feat of reproducing them (I had tried to avoid this by using the same base page spreads for each print). I guess that's a compliment, albeit in a roundabout way. The pitfalls of trying to be clever...