Creative Excursion #5
VBAT’s creatives explore the joy of print
By Anthony Ford
Creative at VBAT
Designers who spend their lives on computers invariably start thinking about the real world in keyboard shortcuts and Adobe CS commands. It’s not unusual, for example, to hold down an imaginary shift key as you straighten a crooked picture frame.
We occasionally need to take our binary-encoded creative brains outside of our digital comfort zone, to a world of inky splendor where keyboards and mouses are replaced with leavers and cranks. A screen-printing workshop at Amsterdam Grafisch Atelier (AGA) is just the place to hang up our Wacom tablets and get our hands dirty.
But before we could submit ourselves to a world of design without computers we sought inspiration of the possibilities this world brings. At neighbouring WOW Amsterdam we perused their eclectic exhibition PRINT. Curated by Sigrid Calon, herself an artist in hot demand. This cacophony of graphic art winds its way down a light-drenched stairwell, easily one of the most impressive ad-hoc exhibition spaces I’ve experienced. The exhibition itself acts as both a gleaming source of inspiration and a catalogue of technical possibilities: the drastic neon screenprints of Michiel Schuurman; the hypnotic grids of Sigrid Calon’s Risoprints; the harsh expressive lino cuts from Christoph Ruckhäberle’s Lubok 11.
“The kind of tangible craft that would make a dad proud”
It’s a rare moment that one gets the opportunity to move from voyeur to creator in a few brisk steps. But within minutes we were no longer admiring art but constructing it ourselves. Housed in an old school AGA has established itself as a focal point of thought-driven graphic arts. A constant stream of international artists flow through these doors and there is a tangible atmosphere of craft. Not the kind of brand craft we’re used to at VBAT but an ink-stained, shirt-ruining, lever-pulling craft. The kind of tangible craft that would make a dad proud (sadly tales of brand guidelines and typeface optimisation fall on deaf ears in my family).
The first step in producing our non-computer aided design was to create a collage of elements to compose and make a screen from. Together. The worlds greatest non-computer-generated, design-by-committee poster. We are given nothing but a sheet of newsprint each and within moments our tongues are out and we’re tearing animals, thunderbolts, child names and lovehearts. Something great is growing
“within moments our tongues are out and we’re tearing animals, thunderbolts, child names and lovehearts”
Our pieces cut we assemble around what can only be described as the mother of all scanners, moving each pieces of artwork around until we are all satisfied with the composition and close the scanner. It takes a rather dramatic hosing down in the wet room to reveal our groups negative print. Now’s where the fun starts.
You’d think each of our 12 prints would end up the same: we all used the same screen with the same three colours (yellow blue and pink) in the same order using the same machine. But each act of force that brings a new colour layer also swipes in a new differentiating factor. It was the infinite idiosyncrasies (accidental or otherwise) of each colour pass that really opened our eyes to the magic of print.
All of a sudden the endless possibilities of our digital design world seemed rather limiting. As we sat on filthy benches waiting for the magenta to dry (the joy of waiting for ink to dry: another blog entry in itself) we talked excitedly of how we can utilize the technique of screen-printing into our daily design lives.
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By Anthony Ford
Creative at VBAT
