At first I thought I had this art lark all wrapped up, I’d put my ideas down on paper, scan them in, spend a few weeks slaving over a graphics tablet, upload them to Imagekind.com and I’d be away. But as you most likely know, and if you don’t you must live a charmed life, there’s a vast difference between theory and practice no matter what you choose to do with your life, charmed or not.
So, I’ve managed to make a litle headway with my dream for a screen printing studio, I’ve managed to gather enough pennies together, well thousands of them actually to procure a Natgraph Exposure Unit. It’s only slightly second-hand, having hardly been used in the few months since the previous owner purchased it. I’m saving over half on the price and the guy has even made a vacuum frame to ensure precision exposures (which I need considering the detail in my work).
it’s a 1600 Watt Automatic Shutter Natgraph Exposure Unit and a top of the line model for the range. I dd want to buy an enclosed unit but for starters they’re almost five times the cost and what’s more I could never fit one through the door.
This is a major slice of the screen printing studio pie, once, as soon, if ever I manage to buy a used A1 screen print table I will almost be there. Sure I will need a drying rack, but I can make one, and there’s a bath going spare in a fully tiled bathroom in the basement so that’s my washout tank. I’ll also need a compressor to blast water at the screens once I need to clean them, but that shouldn’t be too much. I’ll also need screen printing medium and acrylics, paper, emulsion, and an emulsion trough and squeegee but that again won’t require a major initial outlay. But when you add it together it comes to a hefty sum. The Print Club recommended John Purcell for my paper and so I will stick with them for now. Although I have come across a few other helpful companies and so I may shop around before I get too heavily entrenched in debt. Then there are frames, a friend of Ian Brown of Hastings Art College is is on the cards there – he’s based in Deptford but he’s supposed to be cheap. Essentially the one major investment remaining, and the most elusive so far is the manual screen print table. I vow to obtain one somehow, somewhere, someday.
In the meantime I have regrettably had to turn down or rather delay (almost indefinitely) another gallery seeking to represent my work. If enough people had bought larger prints via Imagekind.com I’d have been able to afford the expense of printing, shipping and management, but fate always seems to conspire against me, I have never been great at accruing cash, and never at the time I need it.
It’s a shame because they’d have given me a great deal of publicity seeing as they advertise in many of the national art magazines, although they wanted a painting of Bill and Ben and a 44" x 55" print of Kerching for starters. I can’t even afford to produce my own art right now let alone ship it to galleries the length and breadth of the country.
What really bugs me is the gallery in question is highly respected and could have provided an enormous springboard I needed. Here’s the premise for the exhibition in question "exhibition will distinguish a responce towards the new Tate Triennial show ‘Altermodernism’. The Tate curator Nicolas Bourriaud attempts to suggest a new movement through connecting a selection of artists together in one tight bundle that assimilates through essentially globalisation."
Wow, just up my street, but alas it will never be, like I say, money, timing, not my forte. Ah well, unless I come across an incrediblly generous benefactor who wants to front the funding, set me up with a decent studio and set me on a course to national success I am going to have to take the slow route up the ladder, in fact I will be clambering up the rope beside it.
Success is expensive, in more ways than one, it can be the making or the breaking of an artist, historically the vision of a starving artist living in his garret is not an appealing one for the market these days. Most artists who make it in the conceptual and post-modern market will have at sometime made a loss on their works "just to get them out there", they’ll pay a factory to industrially process materials, or choose to work in expensive metals or on a vast scale. I wish I had the money to blow on the chance of some publicity but I don’t, if you’re an artist, if your work is challenging yet appealing, if you do have a stash, a wad, a bank account brimming with the readies, I’d advise you take a punt, it seems you have to be flush to make it these days.
As I was writing this post I received an email from some artists near the Tate gallery who have finally agreed to dismantle and sell their A1 print table to me, if I can get a phone number, address and some details from them I should have myself three quarters of a print studio in the next week or so!
I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you to get your art out and printed. It’s too bad. I’m enjoying it here on your blog.
Christine’s last blog post..How to Use a Laser Level to Cut a Long Seam Line
Hey Christine thanks for the comment. Don’t worry some stories do have happy endings, my next chapter in this saga should be a little more cheerful. I’ve actually managed to buy a screen printing table, it will need a little work, but by the end of the summer I’m hoping to have a fully fledged screen print studio. I will be able to create and print, sign and number, and of course sell all my own limited edition A1 prints!
Should be fun.