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.
0 Comments
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.
|
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.
Instagram - tcaff.prints [email protected] Categories
All
Archives
February 2018
|