I wanted to try some erasure/extraction poetry, using pages from my MSc thesis from the 70s as the source material and maybe use some gel plate techniques to add some interest.
One of the first pages I chose (p. 90), gave me the line “Extraction of the Fraction”, an omen for this kind of work?
Mainly Photoshop
My first attempts were done mainly in Photoshop ( I only started last Thursday). I had the written text page (first having selected and boxed the chosen words and phrase by hand and crossed out the remaining text) from the MSc thesis on one layer, then coloured the backgrounds on other layers. I finally added an opaque layer mask and made holes in this mask to reveal the chosen words. I tried a different word selection each time.
Mainly Gelli Plate
I selected the text as above. I then glued the thin page on to a thicker card. I don’t know if this was necessary, but I thought it would give the work more strength.
First, I cut out some pieces of thin card and stuck them on top of the chosen words to protect them from the paint from the gel plate. Then added some drops of blue and yellow acrylic paint to the gel plate, used a Brayer roller to produce a thin layer, added some texture to the paint surface with bubble wrap, etc and then put the paper on top of the gel plate and smoothed it down, then removed the paper from the plate after some seconds. (see extract1 https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/wallet6/wp-content/uploads/sites/3554/2023/07/extract1.mp4 )
I let the paint dry on the paper for about 20 minutes, then put some dots of red, orange and yellow paint on the gel plate and rolled it to a thin, flat layer. I turned the paper upside down so that the cardboard covering the chosen words would not be in the same place on the gel plate and smoothed the paper down on the gel plate. after a few seconds I withdrew the paper and the peeled off the card covering the chosen words, Removing the card proved tricky, I found that using a Q tip helped, but I need to find a better solution for hiding and exposing the chosen words.(see extract2 https://spaces.oca.ac.uk/wallet6/wp-content/uploads/sites/3554/2023/07/extract2.mp4 )
I think this was a good start for this method for presenting the poetry to make it visually interesting.
There are a lot of faults with this image, but they can be worked on. I’m pleased with this first attempt.
For Lisa
How funny – yesterday I fell down a rabbit hole online and I can’t remember how I got to Frank Auerbach, but he tutored Tom Phillips, whose work I recognised as the album art for a band I used to follow. Have you been looking at Phillips? Love this work of yours, David 😊
Hi Lisa, thank you for the lovely comment! I’ve seen some of Frank Auerbach’s portraits. but I’d never heard of Tom Phillips. Just had a quick look and already I’m a fan! It’s great to have this feedback and pointers to other great artists. I did some images in photoshop a few years ago, where I made a text sculptured to a portrait of a black lady, The text was a Wordle of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. I put it in a club competition and almost no one noticed the text, and those that did notice didn’t pick up on the implication. Ah well! I can’t post an image in a comment, so I’ll put it at the bottom of the post.
We’ll have to have another Making Day!