Collage and printmaking inspired by Sandra Blow

In June 2012 I had the opportunity to attend a workshop taking the work of Sandra Blow as its starting point. While the course title stated collage and screenprinting, it transpired that the printmaking component was to be a brief introduction to the subject, but after several objections from the six of us attending, this was later changed so that we had a day and a half printmaking at the end of the course.

I was unfamiliar with the work of Sandra Blow, as although she lived in St Ives in her later life she is somewhat removed from the usual line-up of "St Ives artists". Our first morning was spent having a guided tour of Bullen Court, her home and studio, where our instruction was to "draw whatever catches your attention". (In hindsight this could have been better communicated as none of us understood how we would be using the material we gathered. Cameras were also allowed although most of us hadn't brought one and had to make do with our mobiles instead.)

Jon Grimble, Sandra's agent and executor, led us around and the factual content was well sprinkled with anecdotes as he was a long-term friend. He and his partner Denny Long now operate a gallery from the site while preserving the workshop and living space. We had the privilege of viewing an early painting done on her first visit to St Ives, only recently purchased and re-located to Cornwall from America, where it had lain hidden for many years.



Jon Grimble shows us Sandra Blow's "Cornwall" (1958) in her studio at Bullens Court, St Ives


 I made a quick tonal sketch of the canvas. Later, over coffee, we wandered around the showroom looking at some of Sandra's sketchbooks showing her working methods and systematic repetition of a theme or idea- it puts my experimental sketchbooks to shame and has made me rethink how I should approach preparation for a project.

Back at the studios, our tutor Liz Luckhurst encouraged us to select different small sections of some of our drawings and chase down the permutations found in the picture plane. Using viewfinders to isolate sections, we drew lots of boxes, both square and rectangular, filling them with the lines or shapes we found.

 I found it an interesting exercise in abstraction, not one which I would have used to generate a painting perhaps, but I used to employ a similar selection process in developing screen print designs years ago at school. Our final task for the day was to produce a white on black and black on white collage of two of the studies we had produced. Immediately I was out of my comfort zone- collage is something I have rarely done and as an alien way of mark-making it completely threw me. Liz encouraged me not to get too stressed about it and suggested using a mixture of torn and cut edges and "see what happened".

The following day I arrived late and was pichforked into an intensive series of exercises with collage- we'd had to step the pace up a bit to make time for the printmaking part. I remember thinking that I spent longer that morning staring helplessly at bits of torn paper rather than doing stuff, but somehow I managed to produce quite a few pieces by lunchtime- an informal affair where most of us were still working and refuelling at the same time as a BBC documentary/interview with Sandra Blow was being played.

The afternoon was spent being introduced to the techniques of simple printmaking, with an emphasis on being able to do it at home without too many complex materials or resources. While I thought that this would be the part I would enjoy, having screen-printed before, I found it harder to decide what to do than I had with the collage! In part I think this was because I wasn't clear in my mind about how to translate images between media, especially two media which behaved and were applied in completely different ways.

Eventually I developed some very simple torn paper shapes with which to resist the ink, and worked up a few backgrounds to give me a basis on which to work the following day.

On the morning of the third day I found it incredibly difficult to get started, and it was only after fiddling around with some found arrangements of collage material on my trolley (above) that I eventually settled to make a screen using a dual stage resist medium. None of us, tutor included, had used this before, so the results we had were variable. I painted some of my lines too thin so the resist bled under them, although some lines opened up slightly with repeated prints. I had selected a vaguely organic motif from the work I had done on the first day.

Discouraged by the poor quality of the output, I returned to the torn paper strip technique, and began to add pieces of collage to them. The one below shows an accidental result where I had not seen the paper strips had transferred to the paper, so they only partially came off leaving a thin layer of paper adhered to the surface.

This eventually cumulated in a red and orange grid with corrugated strips and a black sun, which I felt was the best piece I had produced during the course.

I really enjoyed the course, not just for the opportunity to be challenged by new materials and methods but as there ware only six of us we had ample time to talk with each other and the tutors, gaining feedback and insights which are the invaluable component of working in a group. It was fascinating to see how each of us developed a completely different aspect of our original drawings, and we had six completely distinct bodies of work by the end of the three days. At the very end, both tutors went round each of us in turn and critiqued our work, which we all found valuable and helpful.