Michael Taylor / Setting the stage for the unexpected
A screen printing collaboration with Michael Taylor epitomises the 50ty/50ty vision.
It’s everything we love about the medium, the process and the conversation; the unexpected magic that results from this oft-misunderstood artform. Because a screen print is not just the finished work, but everything that happens in between.
The dynamic process of collaboration
The parameters involved in a collaboration – the studio space, the residency timeline, the technical possibilities and limitations – set the stage. But what unfolds on the stage is something a lot like improv theatre, where expert actors engage in unscripted, spontaneous dialogue, trusting in the expertise of one another and the creative energy of the moment, drawing on miscellaneous prompts to stretch their creativity and produce something wonderfully unexpected.
We work hard to cultivate this kind of atmosphere in the studio because we love this kind of dialogue. There is literal conversation and also a lot of quiet action. There’s lots of looking and re-looking. Standing back and scrutinising up close. A steady hum of focused solo work punctuated by group deliberations over colour.
Enter Michael Taylor
Taylor’s off-the-cuff and unrestrained process is something he has (paradoxically) honed through years of work and attention, so his approach works beautifully with our own. He refers to his work in general as drawings, “…not so much in terms of medium as in the act of drawing itself: the unreserved process and sense of immediacy – not overly precious but, rather, intuitive, deferring to the drawings themselves and what they ‘want’ to become.”
With this latest work, The Enthusiast, he arrived at the studio with some visual references in mind, including Toulouse-Lautrec and certain Pointillist painters. And then he just started painting – or drawing, as he describes it – directly onto positives, freehand, with that enviable combination of spontaneity and precision that is so typically Taylor.
Ideas and forms emerged, were harnessed and clarified while somehow retaining their inherent looseness. Dialogue continued, covering concerns from the macro to the very specific, as images were exposed onto screens and test printed, the entrance of colour prompting much discussion and much more testing. Images were reworked, positives cut up, screens directly masked off with brush marks. The interplay between deliberation and decisive action found its own flow and determined its own final word.
The whole dynamic is something to behold – and something quite behold-able, really, in the finished result, now available online.
