CASTING METAL LETTERS

For some years now my older brother Stephen has had his own foundry, called Whitton Castings in Charlton. A few days ago he took me through the process of making some letters out of lead. We used lead because it was the  easiest metal to melt in the time available. The same process is used if you wanted to make the letters in aluminium, brass or bronze. Below are the results with a brief description of the process involved.

STEP ONE: You start of with a molding box and the letters you are going to copy. The letters here are some of my own which are make of wood and sprayed silver.

STEP TWO: You then sprinkle parting powder over the letters. This stops the letters sticking to the sand. You could use talcom powder but parting powder is far better. The letters are then covered in a layer of sieved red sand, which is fine and smooth sand and makes for good better finish.

STEP THREE: The red sand is pressed tightly round the letters to stop them moving. Then black sand is sieved and fills the molding box. This is then pressed firmly into the box. More sand is added and pounded so it is tight and firm. A bit like making a sand castle at the beach is the best way to describe it.

STEP FOUR: The Sand is then leveled off, so you have a flat surface. The molding box is then turned over and placed down again. The other half of the molding box is then placed on top. A small piece of wood is place just above the letters, this makes a sort of tunnel for the molten metal to pass through. More parting powder is sprinkled over.

STEP FIVE: Using a metal pipe to press a hole to half way down until you touch the wooden block. Separate the two parts of the molding box and carefully remove wooden block, add more powder.

INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST MYCHAEL BARRATT

Mychael Barratt was born in Toronto, Canada but thinks of himself as a Londoner since arriving for what was meant to be a two week stay twenty years ago. He has a great zeal for his adopted home and includes local settings that have a personal resonance in much of his work. He is a narrative artist and anecdotal incidents from his day-to-day are at the heart of his paintings and prints.

Tim: I wanted to begin by asking how you came to be a printmaker? 

M: I studied mainly painting at Art School. After leaving school, I worked as an illustrator and I saw an exhibition of etchings by an artist called Chris Orr – until recently, he was the Head of Printmaking at The Royal College of Art - and his work really struck me as being fabulous. I had done a bit of etching and I thought I’d look into it and then did a course at St Martin’s and while I was doing the course, I took some of the my pieces out to galleries and started selling them and I’ve been doing that ever since. 

Tim: Does this form the majority of your work now, or do you do painting as well? 

M: Yes, I split my time between the two, 70-30 between printmaking and painting. However, I do reserve my paintings for solo shows. I don’t send them out to galleries, at large. Print-making allows you to earn a living, as an artist, whereas the painting is trickier, because you can only supply a couple of galleries with paintings, whereas with prints, you can supply a hundred galleries, with lots of prints, theoretically. 

Tim: Do you do a limited run of prints? 

M: I do, yes. I usually do between 100 and 150 for the etchings. 

Tim: Would you do all the prints all in one go? 

M: What happens is that I tend to print of about 30 or 40, at the beginning, and then just see how they go. Sometimes you don’t know whether you’ve got something that people are going to want. I have a certain degree of faith in what I do, but probably not to print 100. Also, it takes too long to do. If I sell 30, but it’s slow, then I probably won’t print the rest of the edition; they’ll still be called edition of 100, but there might only be 30 out there. 

Tim: What attracted you to London that you wanted to stay here? 

M: Well, I don’t know, my grandparents were born here and so I thought I should at least check it out and I’d been travelling around Europe for a bit. And, when I got here I just loved it. It is true to say that I’ve always loved cities, and the idea of cities, but this one was really the best. 

Tim: How long have you been living here now? 

M: I’ve been here over 20 years. I’m still a Canadian, but I do feel I’m also a Londoner. 

Tim: If someone was coming to one of your exhibitions, for the first time, how would you describe your work? 

M: Gosh, that’s always a hard one. Narrative, figurative, there’s a strong emphasis on drawing and often a strong emphasis on history in its English narrative tradition. 

Tim: I was going through your work and you seem to enjoy painting people, especially couples i.e. couples in love, couples reading poetry, why did you pick couples? 

M: I’m not sure.

Tim: I noticed that, often, in these paintings there are objects floating about i.e. lanterns, angels, people, papers etc and I just wondered if there was some significance about those things? 

M: Those things have come from something that’s happened in my life and are some kind of anecdote ... the lanterns, for example, is all about when my niece got married and we went out to the New Forest and lit these fire lanterns and let them go there. That was an amazing experience, because when you see these lanterns, in the flesh so to speak, they’re quite something ... almost scary even, but they’re also unbelievably beautiful. It was one of those moments that sticks in my head and I keep going back to that, so that I’ve painted it half a dozen times. I’ve done monoprints of it. I haven’t done any etchings yet, but it will come. With regard to such things as papers floating, it’s partially a device for adding movement into a painting, because it’s quite hard to do that, without doing Gerhard Richter directional brushstrokes, or something like that, but I find putting in floating trails of origami animals, or poems, or something escaping from someone’s hands it is just a wonderful way of getting the viewer's eyes to move through your painting. 

Tim: I like that sort of information ... it’s interesting how you get that sort of feeling into a painting, that’s great. Also you have a lot of dogs in your work. 

M: Yes, I’ve got three cats and a dog. 

Tim: Do they get any commissions on any prints you sell? (they laugh) 

M: Yes, I was just saying to my wife today, about my dog .... Well the dogs responsible for the big Dickens piece I’ve just done; I wouldn’t have done it without the dog, actually, because when we got her, about 2/3 months ago, I had to stay at home with her when she was a puppy. The idea was that I would stay at home and do some painting, but at the same time, I couldn’t have her in the studio with me because she would just get in to everything. But, she freaked out whenever she wasn’t with me and so I had to figure out something I could do while she was in the room with me and I just did drawings for about two weeks and came up with the Dickens piece. So I’ve got her to thank for that. 

Tim: I see you use a lot of street scenes, as well, is that the London theme coming through? 

M: Yeah, the immigrant zeal. 

Tim: Have you got a favourite part of London? 

M: Well, I love where I live in north London, and everything from Highgate, Muswell Hill, Hampstead Heath and that whole area, is probably my favourite part, but I love old buildings and East London is also a favourite. 

Tim: I put the Less is More question to all the artists I’ve interviewed and most of them apply that to their style of work, but in yours it seems to be the opposite, where there is a lot going on. 

M: Yes, there’s ‘More’ (they laugh). It has to be said that I have a hard time leaving empty spaces and tend to fill every corner and I think it’s because there is a sense of narrative about my pictures. I think it is very hard to tell a story, with very few elements and the more I can get in there, to tell the story, the better. 

Tim: Yeah, it’s nice to see how people look at things differently. 

M: I also like to feel that the work is rewarding. Colin’s work, for example, is very stripped down, where he might just have say three elements and that will do something for someone looking at the work, but I also like to reward people from delving into things and to maybe put things in that they wouldn’t have seen when they first saw the piece, so there’s that way of looking at it too. 

Tim: Just wondering what process do you use when you start a piece, do you sketch first, or do you photograph? 

M: Actually, invariably, I almost always tend to write out my ideas in longhand first and then I do a drawing from that and it’s probably to do with the whole narrative thing. I write things down first, as a generation of ideas and then I do a drawing from that and then paint. 

Tim: What about the computer – do you use it? 

M: No, not in the art process, or in the generation of ideas, or anything like that.

Tim: I notice, with some of your early work – and even in some of your newer ones – that you’ve got the main image in the centre and then you’ve got things which come out from the pictures. It’s very effective and I wonder how that came about? 

M: Yeah, it’s actually a technique called counter-proofing. Basically, an etching is done on the plate and then it’s printed onto Japanese tissue paper and then, while the paper and the ink are still wet, it’s placed onto another piece of paper and then run back through the press at high pressure. So, those ones you were talking about, have been printed from paper. What this does is that it allows me to have one bit that’s printed directly from a plate and then other bits – which are still etchings, but which don’t have any plate marks or such and it’s just the shape of the paper i.e. you cut the paper out to fit the image from paper, and then print it from that. It’s a nice way to break the border set. 

Tim: Yes, it’s very unusual the way they come out of the picture. 

M. Yeah, it’s quite funny, because I was telling someone about the technique and this woman came back to me afterwards and said to me ... “I was talking to my daughter, who knows a lot about printmaking, and she says that those bits are not etchings; those bits are lithographs”. And I replied “No, you can tell your daughter that this is how it’s done, I promise you.” 

Tim: would you say that your style has changed much over the years? 

M: Well, I’d say that’s it’s evolved a little bit and certainly, it’s changed from when I first started doing it. I think the pieces were much simpler and there wasn’t that much of an attempt to make them realistic. I like things looking like real. So I think it’s evolved, rather than changed. I think your drawing style, is your drawing style. 

Tim: When you started etching, did you have to learn new skills? And, obviously you’re working with different tools; did you find that hard? 

M: Yeah, it was difficult learning the techniques, but really it’s only as hard as you want to make it and you take it as far as you want to take it, so etching can be quite simple and even straightforward. But then there are other more involved ways of etching. 

Tim: Yes, I’ve been looking into it (watching how it’s done) and there seems to be quite a lot to it i.e. the chemicals, the acid, tints and it’s a long process. 

M: Exactly; it can be tricky. 

Tim: Are you limited in the size you can do, with an etching? 

M: Well you’re limited in how big you can print something i.e. how big your press is. The East London Printmakers have an absolutely enormous press, where you can print huge things. With that, though, you have to figure out how you’ll etch the plates.

Tim: I don’t suppose you can quantify how long something takes to do, but have you any idea about how long the Canterbury Tales took to do? 

M: Well, the Canterbury Tales piece took me longer than anything else I’ve ever done ... that kind of got away from me ... I was controlling it at first, when I was doing the drawing, but then it went into directions that I let it go in. First of all I had to read the Canterbury Tales (he laughs). Basically, it’s got lots of different aspects to it; for example around the outsides are all the depictions of the pilgrims, then there are the tales themselves and all the different places the pilgrims go to on the way. All these little vignettes relate to the pilgrims’ tales. In fact, I did a key for it, the other day, and I found that it was 3,000 words, I got carried away. 

Tim: And how many times would that piece have gone through the press? 

M: This only goes through twice 

Tim: Lots of your pieces are humorous; they bring a smile to the face; they’re happy. 

M: Yes that’s quite important.

Tim: However, there was one where death is playing cricket and I wonder what that is all about? 

M: That one is a very dark little piece, but really it is just a pun.... that’s where it came from. Death and the Maiden and I thought ‘Death and the Maiden over’ (they laugh).... you know, death playing cricket and just missing that last ball in the over. And, you know, that isn’t one of those pieces which makes money. You know sometimes we do work solely for ourselves without  thinking about a possible audience for it. That was one of those pieces for me. I just had the idea and I liked it and went ahead and did it. 

Tim: It’s quite macabre. 

M: Yeah, but I’m still very pleased with that piece. 

Tim: Do you get to do much commission work at all? 

M: No, not now. When I was an illustrator, that was all I was doing, commission work. To be honest, I don’t really like doing it particularly. However, it can be fun, if people give you a commission that is based on your work, and occasionally I’ve had that, where people have asked me to do a piece, based on my own work and then ask me to set it in say, Whitechapel for example and where the brief is quite broad – that can be quite fun. It’s not something I’d like to go back to; I don’t miss it at all. 

Tim: Another piece of yours that I like is – and I’ve done something like it myself – the Monopoly board, I did mine, graphically, using Illustrator. I got to a certain point, did all the places on the board, but then doing the cards sort of put me off .did you get to do your cards yet? 

M: Oh no. I just did the card “You’ve come second in a beauty contest” which is on the piece. That was a fun one to do, actually. I had to go round to all the places and some of the streets I hadn’t really heard of or, if I had heard of them, I couldn’t think of where they were. 

Tim: Yes, there are some fantastic street names in London. I noticed, where I used to work, in Ludgate Hill, where all the churches are, that there are names like Amen Corner, Pilgrim Street, etc. 

M: I like ones that relate to professions, or like Pudding Lane, Petticoat Lane. 

Tim: You’ve done a lot of pieces relating to Shakespeare. Is that something you’ve always been interested in? 

M: Yeah, that’s something I’ve always been interested in. I heard that Sam Wanamaker had plans to rebuild the Globe and I did a piece to raise money for the project and then after the Theatre was built, the person in charge of buying merchandise, asked me if I’d like to have a permanent relationship with them and do things every year, based on the plays they were doing. And I thought that was great. The whole time Mark Rylance was the creative director, he’d ring me up and secretly tell me the names of the plays they’d be doing that year (and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone) and that gave me a running chance to do things based on particular plays. I suppose that was a commission, in a way, but it was quite free, where if they named a play (for instance Timon of Athens) and I couldn’t think what I could do for it, then I just left that and did something else for that year. In other words, I didn’t have to come up with something for each one.

Tim: Were you commissioned to produce your book - Intaglio Printmaking? 

M: Yes. 

Tim: How long did that take? 

M: Well, that took less time than it should have done, but I was still late. They gave me two years to write it. I hit the ground running, interviewed a lot of people and in the first two months did loads of work, but then I didn’t do any work for the next 18 months (he laughs) and then I realised that I’d only four months to get it all done. So what I did was ... my brother and sister-in-law had a place in the New Forest, which had a little outbuilding/studio and because I couldn’t write here, as it was just too distracting (I’d sit down and then I’d think of other things I had to do, I’d get up, I’d start drawing etc) and so I went and lived with them for a week a month for 5 months. So, I guess it took me about five weeks to write the whole thing. 

Tim: And, did you practise the skills that you mention in the book? 

M: Yeah I did. That was the idea, that for every one of the techniques, I met people who were really excellent at these. They’d tell me how they did their technique etc and then I’d go off and practise that technique. The Shakespeare print has an example of every single technique I learnt. 

Tim: So, it was a good experience, learning all those techniques? 

M: Oh yeah, it was fantastic. I mean, there are some techniques that I’d never use again, with the best will in the world, even though I think they are wonderful. I bought a bunch of engraving burins, and gave it a go, but realised that it just takes so long and for you to get really good at it, you’d have to devote a phenomenal amount of time to it and I don’t know if I have the patience for it. There are some techniques that I use all the time now and I learnt how to do them from that experience. 

Tim: Can I ask you about colour itself i.e. how you use colour ... do you use colour theory.... how do you work with colour? 

M: With painting, colour is just an intuitive thing, but I have a phenomenal palate. I like to mix the colours and find the combinations of paints and mix them, and I’ll have 50/60 colours out on my palate when I’m painting a piece – a ridiculous amount actually. Sometimes I have to scrape off colours which have been on there for months i.e. 10-20 colours. I usually have a range of every possible colour imaginable. However, printmaking is totally different, I am usually trying to evoke something with a colour, so like with the Canterbury Tales again, I was trying to find colours that would actually give it a sense of being contemporary and yet still had the feeling of being a mediaeval map, or something like that. I work on the colours quite a lot, on the prints. I enjoy that aspect. However, until about 2 or 3 years ago, I didn’t use colour inks at all in my printmaking. I’d print monochromatically and then hand colour things, but now I use colour tints all the time. I love it.

Tim: I asked Colin this question, when you travel abroad, do you see colour differently? 

M: Well, my sense of colour and my feeling about colour has changed since I’ve been in London and I use a very London palate in my painting especially i.e. a very subdued. Maybe I’d use different colours if I was in Canada. I think it is less colourful here, but I love the variety of tones and shades. It is true that the light is very different here.


See more of Mychael's work at www.mychaelbarratt.com

MANIFESTO OF GRAFFITO - 2011

As part of one of our briefs we have been asked to read Graphic Design Theory - Readings from the field. Then we have to comment on some of the essays. I would say I am no academic and have found some of what I have read a little hard going. On page 21 their is the Manifesto of Futurism, which reminded me in some ways of what Remi/Rough said when I interviewed him last month. So I have re-written the manifesto in honour of Remi.

LITTLE LIZZIE WHITTON, BY SOME GREAT GRAFFITI WRITING I FOUND IN SHOREDITCH.

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM 1909 RE-INTERPRETED 

MANIFESTO OF GRAFFITO - 2011 

1. The work of our hands will reveal our love of danger. We will be fearless and our energy will know no bounds. 

2. We will show courage and audacity. We will be bold and daring in the pursuit of our Art. 

3. When the world is asleep, tucked up in bed or closeted indoors, we will harness our feverish insomnia, as we roam the dark places, running from the law and leaping/darting out of sight at all times. 

4. Our deconstructed letter forms will be a thing of magnificent beauty. We will create, with speed and fervour. The tails of our letters will be like serpents wrapped around their prey. 

5. We will use our paints and sprays (aerosols) with the precision of a Samurai warrior – fast, accurate and to the point. 

6. Our fore fathers painted in caves, but we will paint in tunnels, alleyways and in places full of urban decay. 

7. To most, our work is ugly and aggressive, but to a few open-minded ones, it will be a masterpiece on the stark, faceless concrete canvases 

8. We will break down the walls of confrontation. When our work is done, we will admire it frame it with a quick glance and then store it in our memories forever. Then we will move on, in a flash, to a new adventure. 

9. The masters of our Art will fight for supremacy, in an urban warfare. Each line will be a destructive gesture, in the eye of authority. But, to the youth this beautiful art will bring passion to their mind – Art that took risks, even onto death. 

10. We will not let our work end up in galleries, or museums, where the public has to pay to see it. Our art must be free, framed by its urban birthplace – not stagnating behind glass, but free, alive and open to the elements. 

11. As night falls, we will bring riotous operas of colour. Multi-coloured tides of revolution will burst from every capital letter with gusto. Bold vibrant-coloured aerosol cans will glitter under neon street lights. It will be a new dawn for the freedom of expression.

INTERVIEW WITH ARTIST COLIN MOORE

Colin Moore was born on the Clyde Coast of Scotland in 1949.  He studied architecture in Glasgow. After years of study he ended up with two degrees and became an architect. An international career in architecture and design followed. Colin is much travelled and has lived in South America and Spain. With his language skills he went to Madrid and helped build the Spanish high speed train system.  He has worked in London as an architect and as a Creative Director with a firm in Covent Garden. In 2002 Colin was made redundant, but in a good way i.e. he had the money to do what he’d always wanted to do – which is paint and from this he became a printmaker. It was tough for Colin at first.  However, slowly but surely, he has established himself and is becoming better known. Colin has recently had his first book published: PROPAGANDA PRINTS a history of art in the service of social and political change.

Tim: Have you always wanted to be a painter and did it come easily to you, or did you have to work at it?

Colin: Ever since I was a tiny child – and according to my mother -  loved drawing and she says I could draw long before I could talk!  I would draw all over everything, which didn’t make me very popular, I always really loved drawing and I suppose becoming an architect was partly to do with that, but also, paradoxically, becoming an architect put me off a bit, if you know what I mean.  Because it was my day job, I didn’t feel like doing painting or anything like that at night.  I wanted to do something different at night. I had to get all of that out of my system when I started to draw and, in fact, as I got older and past my fifties, I started to think ‘you know, this corporate world has been good to me but .... it’s not really what I want to do and I feel like I’m wasting my time a wee bit here’ and I began to wonder what it was that I actually wanted to do? Also, I thought ‘how old do I need to be to give myself permission to do what I really want to do?’ I was a bit scared of doing it, at that stage,,   Of course, I had to consider the whole financial security side of it too.  I thought about how I’d travelled all over the world, through my work and how I started to take a sketchbook with me, wherever I went, religiously, and I would lie and connive so I could get time to myself, so I could go and draw.  I gathered together all these sketchbooks and really this went on for about two or three years, drawing a lot and I was working with pen and ink and a little bit of colour (but not much though at the start) because it was mostly about getting my drawing style back .... Well actually, let’s rephrase that .... getting my drawing style established, because I felt that I really didn’t have one.  In fact, that was the basis of the whole thing, actually, as it gave me the confidence, when the opportunity came along, to make the break.  It wasn’t as if I had started from nothing and although I hadn’t realised it at the time, I had already achieved a recognised style of work, which is what you can see on the walls all around you.  It’s all about drawing for me and so, I had a starting point and a whole body of work that I could draw on and develop.

Tim: In architecture, is it fair to say that you have to draw things which have to be exact i.e. the measurements are exact but, with your art, you now had the opposite of that, you had the freedom to do what you wanted to do.

Colin: Yeah, I mean, it could be what you wanted to be. The nice thing about art is that you get to make the rules, but there is definitely a truth behind what you’re asking there, which is .... should I really have been an architect?  All I can say about that is that it is a fantastic education and one of the best educations, as it’s very broad and is really interesting but I think, temperamentally, I wasn’t all that suited to being an architect. I mean I was smart enough to do it, but attention to detail is not really my thing and actually, I wasn’t really all that hugely interesting in building, either!  However, having said that, I’m still very interested in architecture as an art and I’m interested in making my own art, from architectural subjects – which is something I wasn’t at the beginning and I deliberately stayed away from architecture and wanted to get away from it, as it was my background so to speak.  But, I can see that it is starting to creep back in now, albeit changed and warped, to suit my artistic interests.  Looking back on it though, I don’t regret anything I’ve done in my life. I’ve come to realise that I wasn’t a natural born architect.

Tim:  Are there any particular artists that you like?

Colin:  Oh yeah, I’ve always loved art and that was another thing which helped me make the break and to make the change ... that all my life I’ve been into art and artists.  Haunting art galleries is a thing that I’ve always done, so I knew a lot about art before I made the break.  I’ve had love affairs with all kinds of artists and taken inspiration from them.

Tim: You use lots of kinds of mixed media in your art.  Would you say that you prefer one above another?

Colin: I don’t have a preference that would make me not want to work with any of the others, if you see what I mean .... No.  Every medium that you work with has its own challenges and its own opportunities.  However, having said that, I love oil painting and it’s not for nothing that oil painting is so important in the world of art, because it is just so flexible and powerful as an expressive medium and so sexy when you’re working with it.... it’s just a real joy, and I always go back to that.  But, this whole print thing has come as a sort of surprise to me.  As you’ll probably recognise I do linocuts, mostly, and I got into it almost by chance.  A good friend of mine, who is a well known printmaker, suggested that I try it out, as he thought my style would suit it and it turns out that he was absolutely right and I do really enjoy it; I really like printmaking and it’s what helped me make a living.  Also, I found it easier to get into the world of printmaking, rather than painting, so far!!

Tim:  When you do any sort of work, how do you begin ... do you start with a sketch ... how you build up to a piece.

Colin:  Everything starts with drawing for me; in fact, everything is about drawing and the technique which I have evolved is that I do little drawings, that are really quite small and which are done very quickly.  Simplicity is really important to me in my work, and if you can I try and keep it really simple.  I find that working small helps me to do that and basically I have various techniques that I use.  These little drawings form the basis of everything that I do and I try to be as faithful as I possibly can, not just to the spirit of that drawing, but to the detail of it, as well.  After I’ve done these drawings I use computer techniques. I scan and blow up stuff and that is a really crucial part of what I do, in keeping the character of my drawings.  I couldn’t do what I do if I didn’t use this technique.

Tim: That was actually what I was going to ask you about in one of my questions. Do you ever take photographs and then come back and work on them in your studio.

Colin:  Well, I prefer to draw at the site but, at the same time, sometimes it’s just not possible... it might be too crowded; it might be insecure in some way, it might be raining ... all sorts of things.  So I generally do both.  It is true that I use photographs, but I never use photographs as the basis for the work, rather as the basis for the drawing, so that the photograph is the second-best way of being there, if you see what I mean, so that I never really use the photographs, in themselves, as I don’t really see the point of that and my work is quite expressive, in its own right, so that I might need to change things, or move them around and make them shift.

Tim:  It’s funny you should say that ... when I interviewed Paul Catherall, he said a similar thing, in that he takes photographs as well as drawings on site, and that if you work straight from the photograph, you’d know it straight away,  it’s no good.

Colin:  Yeah, it doesn’t work.

Tim: Can I ask you about colour now.  You said that you started off just sketching in pen and ink and gradually began to introduce colour.  How have you found working with colour?

Colin: I have found a deep and abiding love of colour, in me.  There is a Scottish tradition of colour.  As you probably know, The Glasgow Boys were recently featured in The Royal Academy and the Scottish Colourists are even more famous. I don’t know what it is about my people but, we really are in love with colour, as a race .... it’s probably because we don’t have any in the landscape (laughs) .... well, that’s not true, but it is quite bleak up there!!  Whatever, the connection is, I feel it very strongly.  I love colour and I love working with colour, in an expressive kind of way.

Tim:  Do you think there is a kind of science behind colour?

Colin:  There definitely is, yeah.  From my technical background, I don’t have a problem with that, but at the same time, I have to admit that it’s not how I work.  It is true to say that I’ve become familiar with various different colour theories that have developed over the years and I must admit that I have had some help from ideas of colour theory, if no more than to help me to actually mix the colours that I want. I have found concepts like complementary, colours i.e. hot and cold, hue, tone etc.... you know, all those things which are associated with colour, I have found helpful. But, in the end, I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that my approach to colour is totally intuitive and when I’m mixing the colours, I’m gone and I don’t know what’s going on!  But, when I see the colours I want, I recognise them and so, it’s quite an emotional thing, the way I work with colour.  I can’t fully explain what I’m doing and I kinda find it quite hard to take the necessary precautions to be able to remember how I actually got a colour, in the first place.  To help me, I keep a studio book, when I’m mixing colours ... and you know, it’s quite important that I can remember it, because as a printmaker, I don’t print my whole edition at the beginning, so I have to go back and find the same colour again, as a matter of routine.  For me, that goes against the grain a wee bit.

Tim:  With Paul Catherall, when he does his series of fifty or whatever, he does them all in one go 50 blue skies then 50 of the next colour it’s interesting how different people work.  Now, when you travelled, did you notice how colour was different, in different countries and even that you looked at colour differently in those countries?

Colin: It certainly is. Obviously the climatic conditions are different. The angle of the sun is different, for example, in the Tropics, the sun is right overhead, so that you can have no shadows and everything is just blasted by the sun, in the middle of the day.  The sky is often washed out, so that it appears white, because there is so much sunlight and of course colours are very, very bright, in sunlight places and not so bright in others.  But, you also have to take into account that colour is different in different places.  What I am sure of, if nothing else, is that it is very important to be open to those changes and variations and work with them.  However, having said that, the faithful reproduction of natural colour is really not what my work is about!  As you can see, I am quite tactical with colour and fairly arbitrary as well, you know, because if I want a bright orange sky in Essex, then I’m sorry, that’s what you’re going to get, even if there has never been that colour sky in Essex, in living memory, I’ll do it if it’s suits my purpose.

Tim:  I’ve been looking through your work and I’ve noticed that you do a lot of work with boats, harbours and fisherman.  Is that because of where you come from?

Colin: Yes, I think basically it is.  All my ancestors, on my mother’s side anyway, were sailors and so it’s definitely in my blood.  I was born on the Clyde coast and when I was little, I used to visit, my mother’s family a lot.  They lived down the harbour and the sea was always there and a lot of my most vivid memories and cherished childhood memories are of the sea and boats and that is definitely a deep-running thread in my life.  I get a lot out of being by the sea and even today when I go down to the coast and I get a charge like no other!  It is something that really inspires me.

Tim: Looking at those fishing paintings, the ones that stuck out for me is the Night Fisherman and The Death of the Fisherman.

Colin:  Oh really!

Tim: I’m wondering where all of that came from? Was it because of the superstition of sailors?

Colin:  Possibly the mythology that surrounds it interests me.  Yeah.  It’s interesting that you should select these two paintings, as these are two pictures which, in pure commercial terms, have been spectacularly unsuccessful.  People seem to be scared about some of these subjects, actually.  Any picture depicting death and you’ll have a hard time shifting it! It’s a pity really, as it’s an interesting subject and more interesting the older we get!  I like those pictures and that’s one aspect that runs through ... and I’m speaking about the mythological side there ... But as far as the fisherman is concerned, then that’s a different thing.  Another thread that runs through my work is - and I don’t want to sound pompous - that it’s all about social awareness ... and because I like maritime, coastal subjects and I tend to go around coastal towns in this country a lot, it has struck me that a lot of these towns are in bad shape.  You know, fishing’s had it in a lot of places – in most places, in fact – and there’s not a lot happening in these places and they’re not happy places, or should I say they don’t seem to be happy.  However, I don’t have the good fortune to know many people living in these sorts of places.  But, just going in there and visiting them, it’s obvious that a lot of them are pretty rundown, compared to what they were, even 50 years ago and I find that quite sad.

One of my oil paintings (hanging in his studio) is called ‘No More Fishing’ and I got the idea for that painting, walking along the prom at Brighton.  You get to a point on the prom in Brighton, where there a couple of kiosks which sell ice cream and postcards and stuff and beside them, by way of decoration, there is an old fishing boat that they’ve planted out with flowers and I thought that was a really powerful and poignant image, from my point of view, that is, because this was somebody’s livelihood, this boat, but now it’s just got flowers in it.  It struck me as being a metaphor for the whole fishing community and industry, in this country, as we’ve moved from fishing to .... well, what can we call it ... tourism ...  So, this series of paintings and in particular the idea of no more fishing has formed a commentary on the social state of our coastal towns and villages now.  However, I also paint seaside towns like Brighton, which show the bright side of the seaside, the happy family side, the deck chairs etc.

Tim:  When I considered the Death and the fisherman painting, it reminded me of that old hymn.... ‘those in peril on the sea’ and how it is one of the most dangerous jobs there is, if that film A Perfect Storm is anything to go by.

Colin:  Several members of my family, in past generations, have died at sea, the sea is dangerous, you know, and that’s what makes it so fascinating as well, as it’s not all blue skies and ice cream..... It can be pretty dark.

Tim:  On the other hand, and sticking with the theme of the sea, my wife likes your deck chairs paintings!

Colin:  Well, on the contrary, they are hugely successful ... yeah, people like those pictures, as they represent the happy side of the seaside.

Tim:  Yeah they’re bright and happy and reminiscent of trips to the seaside and trying to control things, like deck chairs, tents etc, on blustery days. Moving on, you’ve done another series based on actors and masks that fascinated me.  Where did that come from?

Colin:  Well, that was early stuff, actually. I suppose it was a comment on, not just actors, but all of us, as we have one face for home, another for work, another face for our friends and another face for our enemies.  The idea of the actor, who can change his appearance, by having a mask, was fascinating and actually, in technical terms, it gave me quite a lot of rich material to work with graphically, as I could draw a face, but then have it partly covered and, of course, it then led me into that whole series.

Tim: It’s interesting, but there’s one which isn’t quite the same, but is related i.e. the actor on the TV. Did you do that at the roughly the same time or not?

Colin:  Slightly later.  That is part of a TV series and that came from an idea I had, of a motif of a picture within a picture, which runs right through the history of western art.  There are loads of examples such as that of Valazquez when he did Las Meninas .... you can see the King and Queen, his patrons, reflected in a mirror behind him and it’s as if that’s another picture inside the picture that he’s painting.  Of course, the modernists picked up on that, and, for example Ben Nicholson did lots of interiors, but with a window in the picture and the view out the window was in the picture as well, so you’ve got an interior, with a view of an exterior – a picture within a picture.  And this is a rich thing, because it gives you a new dimension within the work; it gives you a dialogue, if you like.... perhaps a tension, if you want there to be.  So, I was aware of that and maybe that’s what got me into it.  But when I did the very first TV picture, I thought there was fantastic potential, enormous potential, to put a TV screen with a TV scene of your own choice – and your mind runs riot with the possibilities there;  in fact, mine did!  And something happened quite soon after I did the series.  On the internet, I found a site put up by this guy who collects old TV Test cards.... Well there’s a nostalgic element to that – and you can tell from everything I do, that there is a lot of nostalgia, for good or ill, in my work.  Also, I realised that there was a lot of graphic potential in these test cards.... squares and grids of lines, blocks of colour and things I could play with and pervert ! Which I like to do!  And so that’s how that series, within the TV series happened. 

Tim: Yes, my children have no concept of the TV only being available at certain times, as they can watch it at any time they like, day or night. They probably don’t even know what the test card looks like. Moving on to the next question now .... Are you asked to do commissions much at all?

Colin:  No, I haven’t been asked to do many commissions, at the moment, to be honest.  However, having said that, sometimes people will see a work and say ... ‘I’d like a painting of that’ or a couple of times I’ve exhibited a painting and someone has bought it and then someone else has said ‘oh I wanted to buy that’ and ‘could you do something like that for me?’  I’m actually working on a commission just now – Faber & Faber, the literary publishers, have asked me to produce a print, which they can use for the front cover of a new book about Wordsworth’s poetry, as part of a series on romantic poets that they’re about to publish. So that’s a commission and I’m really enjoying it, actually.  (I’ll show you how it’s coming along, when I show you the studio upstairs.)

Tim:  I just wondered if you might find it restrictive if you have to do work for other people.

Colin: No, I don’t have that problem, but that’s probably because people aren’t asking me that much.  However, having said that, I’m not sure I’d be happy working to commission all the time.  To be honest, as an architect and designer, I’ve had to work to other people’s briefs all my life, and becoming an artist, has been about writing my own brief.  And so, up until now, I’ve been very happy enjoying finding my new-found freedom, to really want to do commissions regularly.  I’m not saying I’m against it, you know, and you have to take any work you can get as an artist, let’s be honest.  But, given the choice, I’d rather do the stuff that comes out of my own head!

Tim:  I’d just like to run something by you now.... you know that term ‘Less is more’.  Do you believe that, in the work that you do?

Colin:  Yes, I absolutely do.  It was a German architect/modernist called Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who coined that phrase.  Of course, with my modernist, architectural background I’ve experienced this.  Less is more is how I was trained to be an architect and all my life, as an artist and a designer generally, I’ve found that simplicity is a virtue.  When I say this, I mean that if you can cut something out of a picture, without damaging its essence, then you should cut it out.  I think my drawing style follows that dictum too.  I don’t like to get bogged down in extraneous detail.  I believe the smallest number of marks on a page, to get the idea across, is what I’m looking for and I try to ruthlessly get rid of stuff that’s not actually contributing very much.

Tim:  Do you put a time limit on your work?

Colin:  Time limit? (pauses here). I think there is a time limit, but I don’t impose it, consciously.  I think I get bored.  I like to change things and that’s one of the reasons why I wasn’t a great architect, as well.  You know, it takes a long time to build things and you’d get fed up, towards the end of the two years etc, or whatever it is.  I really enjoyed working with graphic design, later on in my life, for the reason that the turnover was quicker.  So with my paintings and my prints, the faster I can do them, the better.  I do work very quickly.  I am a bit of a procrastinator, but once I get going, I do work fast and I find that I do my best work when I’m really flowing.  I like to do something, get it done and then move on and do something else.  That’s my ideal.

Tim: Can I ask you about graphic design. What style do you like?

Colin:  I like minimal stuff but, at the same time, I’ve gone through changes as far as graphic design is concerned.  For example, my appreciation of graphic design and my taste has changed a lot recently.  I don’t know if you’re aware that I produced a book. When I was researching this book, I came across a lot of design which wasn’t particularly familiar to me and I loved it.  The Russian Constructivist, for example and I really fell in love with that. I would say, of all the graphic designs styles, at the moment, probably one of the ones that I like most is the Russian Constructivists.  Of course, they had a huge influence on all the western graphic design that came after that in the 20th century.  So that style of quite dynamic, bright, modernist look, that’s the stuff I like best.

Tim:  I went to Budapest last year and there is a museum there called The Museum of Terror and it features the oppression of the Hungarian people.  Within the museum, there is a whole room, about 20ft high, where each wall is covered in posters, similar to the ones in your book.  They were predominantly red.  They are very powerful.

Colin: They really are.  In fact, the whole history of Russian Constructivist art fascinates me.  I have a natural tendency towards a socialist view of life and to read about these young Russian artists re-inventing art for the purposes of freeing the proletariat brings tears to my eyes; it’s absolutely wonderful.

Tim:  What set you off, on your journey, putting all these posters together for the book?  Was it just what you’d come across in your travels?

Colin: Well, I was invited, by a publisher, to come up with an idea for a book and I’d been in Mexico just before that.  The offer came along and my head was full of Mexican political art and so I suggested a book about political propaganda art and to my surprise they thought ‘that’s a great idea ... get on with it!’  It wasn’t a subject that I knew much about before, but I know a lot about it now!  It took me two years to write the book.  It’s a very interesting subject.

But to get back to your question about graphic design.  I wasn’t trained in graphic design, of course, and architects, as a general rule, don’t have a huge appreciation of graphic design, to begin with.  However, what’s happened to me, without me really realising it, is that all the way through my life .... and although I had an architectural education, and worked as an architect for years, it’s all been about visual communication for me - that’s what ties together all my interests and it’s what made the process of writing the book so fruitful for me, because the subject of Propaganda Art ties together all my individual interests in what is, actually, visual communication.

Tim: Funny you should say that, but that’s the name of my course Design for Visual Communication.  It’s nice to pick your brains about that and what it means to you.  

Moving on from that, how do you think this theme of propaganda features in our lives today?  Do you think still think it exists, and is still going on, but we are just not aware of it?

Colin:  You’ll have to read the book!  The last chapter tries to deal with what is going on now and what might go on in the future, but really, since I started in ancient Mesopotamia, I was kind of out-steamed before I got to there and I found that there was a whole other book there .... What’s happening now is phenomenal, as far as propaganda is concerned and I think the last statement of text in the book is that we’re all propagandists now and surely that’s a good thing.

Tim:  To round up the interview, Colin, I just wanted to ask you about your ink drawings and your work in black and white.  Do you like the discipline of only working with one colour?

Colin:  I do because, again, it’s a simplification tool where, if you restrict your means, then it forces you to simplify things; it forces you to take a tactical view of how you construct the image, because you can’t use colours to differentiate things, or use colours to achieve depth etc.  So, yes I love working in black and white, where I have to make an image work, technically.  And, because I’m a relief printmaker, it’s a good discipline for me, because quite often I have to re-organise and simplify an image to make it work.  If I want to only print one or two blocks, or whatever, I have to simplify things.  Working in black and white, drawing in black and white, working with ink (I do a lot of ink drawing) it’s a really good workout;  it really keeps your eye in.

www.colinmoore.uk.com