colours painted into the screen

After all the time spent thinking, sketching, planning and sketching again, the printing process is fast and furious.  I spent a whole day in the print studio: in the morning I exposed the artwork into the screen and mixed my colours, and in the afternoon I made the print.

inks mixed ready to print the exposed screen

the first layer drying on the rack

layer two: a blend of purple and brown to add detail

layer 3 - green/blue highlights

I overprinted the image with words to bring the three parts of the tryptich together, and finally added the feathers  – I used real feathers in the exposure unit with the hand drawn artwork, and then printed the ‘negative’ image by painting the ink straight onto the screen – the same method I used for the first layer.

the final print

Pascale Petit is known for her vast imaginative reach, sharp editor’s eye and consumate craftmanship. Her fifth collection, What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo is ‘a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo’s life and work’.

Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Listening to her read with the paintings projected behind her at the Old Horse Hospital in London last week, I was struck by just how integrated the paintings and the poems are — it was as if the paintings were speaking, not the poet or the artist. Pascale IS however speaking in this interview I had with her about her writing process, where she shares some early first drafts from a collection that was 10 years in the making.