This print, as part of the launderettes of Blackstock Road series, was a fun departure from the architecture of the buildings. The monotony of the large, dull washing machines is contrasted with colourful clothing spinning inside. As you can see below, it was pretty tricky to keep the colours separate as I worked the ink with the squeegee. In the end, I gave into the temptation to blur everything together and I'm happy with the unusual results of that experiment. Hopefully I can wash the ink out of my clothes!
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I'm lucky to be friends with the extremely talented Kadie McGinley who rocks absolute socks as part of The Delta Slow. We were looking for a project to collaborate on and their upcoming EP launch was the perfect chance. The record is brilliant and was recorded at Old Paradise Studios in Hoxton. For the artwork, Kadie and me took an evening to explore the area around the studio and take some photographs. The towering, decaying gas cylinders in the area were inescapable and became the basis for the EP artwork. A few chats over pints and some listening sessions of the music sent me in the direction of the finished artwork. From that point it all came together pretty quickly, as the band and me were almost instantly on the same aesthetic page.
Half tones and vectors recur, setting up contrasts while keeping the images in stark black and white. The designs work for laser and screen printing and the band will be putting out copies of both in the next few weeks. I'll follow this up at some point with pics of the screen print session and other bits we created for the EP launch. It's been seriously fantastic collaborating with such exciting musicians on this one: make sure you give them a listen and grab the EP. I followed up my first launderette with a neighbouring one on Blackstock Road. As with the previous piece, I'm trying to play around with half tones and block colours in an effort to disrupt the usual way you would view somewhere like a launderette. As they fall into the background of gentrified north London we should pay them more attention before they completely disappear. On a whim, I attempted to place these two launderettes next to each other. I didn't use any proper registration to line everything up, but I'm happy with the result of this little experiment. Keep an eye out for part 3 of the series, my next trip to the launderettes of Blackstock Road is in a different direction...
I was happy with how the London Snow Christmas cards came together and off the back of that I had a commission for a Bristol version. This was another fun card to do and I used some nicer, thicker stock for the print. From left to right the card shows the Bristol Cathedral, Clifton Suspension Bridge and Wills Memorial.
That's all for the Christmas cards this year but I might look at doing a large poster version in the near future! When our washing machine broke a few weeks ago I assumed we were pretty screwed for clean clothes. A few days in and beginning to stink, we turned to a launderette around the corner on Blackstock road. I had never actually been in a launderette and the experience jolted me into realising just how many are dotted around our neighbourhood. Launderettes somehow still stand as bastions against new wave coffee shops, wood-clad ramen restaurants and micro-brew pubs: they're part of the fabric of London life yet barely noticed amidst encroaching gentrification. For this print I wanted to give some more longevity to the launderette that got me out of a pinch. Based on a few photographs, I re-drew the façade and used half-tones to create a confused, noisey background. The launderette gets centre stage here, with the London street around it depicted as transient and shifting. I've been working on a few prints of other Blackstock Road launderettes under this theme and click here for part 2 and part 3.
'Tis the season and all that so I've been working on a set of screen printed Christmas cards. I wanted to keep things minimal, and based on areas of London I've become familiar with this year: Upper Street in Islington, Kingsland Highstreet in Dalston and finally, Bloomsbury. Much of my art recently has been focussed on unusual architecture. For these cards, I aimed to represent landmarks from these areas in silhouettes, with some abstract snow flakes drifting upon the rooftops. For example, the Bloomsbury card features the Wilkins Building at University College London, the houses around Bedford Square and the Curzon cinema at the Brunswick Centre: The finer detail, particularly on the houses in this card really pushed the limits of my screen and there was some blue air in the studio as I had initial trouble with ink smudging. Thankfully, with some good advice I rectified the issues (there was a lot of playing around with clamps, vices and screen bed heights) and completed the series on Friday. There are three street designs, each with two editions of different coloured snow flakes. Here's the Bloomsbury card again, this time in red, pre-folded and on the drying rack: My Upper Street card has a few cafés, Union Chapel and Screen on the Green, while the Kingsland Highstreet card features Ridley Road Market, Kingsland shopping centre and the Rio cinema. Each has the series titled printed on the back.
I'm hesitant to throw up lots of pictures of the series because I intend to actually send them to people and don't want to spoil the surprise: but if you insist, use the below slideshow to see the other designs! I'm also looking to sell some of these on the cheap to help cover my costs, so drop me a line if you're interested in a few blank ones. For the final piece in this series I wanted to connect back to the films shown in the Odeon in Muswell Hill. With a little bit of research I discovered that the first film to show in the venue was "Educated Evans", starring Max Miller and directed by William Beaudine. The film is now unfortunately lost, though as part of their 'Most Wanted' campaign, the BFI have a great article about it.
William Beaudine was a fascinating director, renowned as one of the world's most prolific and one who helped to frame the remit of early cinema. If you were a film-goer in at any time between 1920 and 1960, you almost certainly would have seen at least a handful of his 500 works. Poor critical response and derision of his filming techniques however, relegated Beaudine to "B-movies". He was unperturbed by this and showed a dedication to his craft and his love of film by continuing to commit himself to each of his features. The parallels to the Odeon in Muswell Hill's recent fortunes are obvious. I think it fitting that this stalwart director who fell upon hard times yet strived to reinvent himself had his name on the first film shown in the venue, a venue which faces the challenges of contemporary cinemas with optimism. This quote from Beaudine on 120gsm summarises his determination and rounds out the series. The Odeon in Muswell Hill had some pretty unusual design features and I've been trying to distill these features into one print as an abstract homage. I ended up focusing on three of them: The external sign is a classic and I very much wanted to include their blocky font. I also really loved the Art Deco lamps: they've got a sense of movement, forming arrows that point towards the cafe and lobby while emitting muddied, low tone light. Finally, the faulty strip lighting inside the cinema screen area struck me as a good summary of this once vibrant cinema drifting into obscurity. This lighting strip also resembled 35mm film, the mainstay of the pre-digital days. This abstract piece gave me some hassle in printing as I had over-exposed my screen, meaning it was difficult to draw out the detail within the middle lamp. It's not worth posting those test prints but I hope to get back to this piece in the future.
I love a good cinema and particularly those built in the Art Deco style of the early 20th century. So I made it my business to tour a few of these sites during Open House London 2014. The Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley is a classic, but it was the odd, squat Odeon in Muswell Hill that really caught my eye. When I decided to start working on some graphic design and screen prints I returned to some photos I snapped during that visit and put together a short series. It has since been refurbished, but the venue was fairly dilapidated and poorly maintained. A Grade II listed building from 1936, it was clearly struggling to compete with more contemporary cinemas in the area. The venue was still charming in its ageing, a monument to the early days of popular cinema. I wanted to capture some of these thoughts and unique design features in this series. I started with a photograph of the striking facade, using some thresholding techniques to indicate decay. The composition gets lighter at the top, with the iconic sign fading into the permanence of the background. I printed this on 150 gsm card, though it had a slight texture to it. The print was a good early experiment for me with thresholding and contrasts.
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Tadhg CaffreyI'm an Irish printmaker, living in North London and focusing on urban landscape, construction and abstract geometry. My first name sounds like "tiger" without the last bit.
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