Independent Printmaking Project!

Wow! Senior year has been pretty crazy. I expected it to get a bit easier after first semester, but that has not been quite the case. I have been caught up in a whirlwind of work, but everything I have going on is voluntary and exciting!

I have been trying hard to set aside time to work on my art. I am actually conducting a year-long, printmaking project on propaganda through my school’s independent study program. Propaganda has always interested me because I feel that it represents how much influences people’s decisions, and I find the intersection between art, history, and rhetoric to be quite fascinating. 

For my printmaking project, I am studying a few historical propaganda prints, redesigning them to surround modern issues, and printing my designs using the same historical techniques.

My favorite that I am working on right now is based off of a student print from the 1968 revolutions in Paris, shown below.

As soon as I saw this print, I was drawn to its simplicity, relative to other prints from the past. There are no words, so the picture is all the more striking. I immediately wanted to redesign this poster to relate to police brutality (the connection is pretty clear). I came up with this:

After designing this print on my iPad, the next step is carving and printing. There are certain aspects of the original print that clued me into thinking it was carved in wood: there are slips (look at the thumb), the lines are frayed (“blurry” due to the splintering nature of wood), and you can see the grain of the wood in the print itself (if you look closely, you can see darker vertical lines in the print. This is due to the different ways that dark and light wood absorb ink). I am currently in the process of carving this print, and I forgot how much I dislike wood carving! It is extremely difficult to work against the grain because you get the frayed/splintering effect, and it is probably the medium most conducive to slips. Luckily, in our era, there are certain products that can remedy these mistakes, such as wood filler (a putty-like material that can be placed into incorrect carvings that dries to match the texture of the wood). 

My other three prints are from World War I, World War II, and another from the 1968 Paris revolutions. I redesigned them to focus on climate change, political apathy, and political partisanship, respectively.

The prints from WWI and WWII are much more detailed in nature, and I will update my blog when they are all complete!