Living Room

With it's pink background on both walls and floor, Living Room is pretty obviously inspired by Matisse's Pink Studio, which I had seen in Paris (while it was on tour) the year before. Embarrassing to quote a painting so stratospherically far away from ones own effluences as such an influence, but it simply blew me away, and while I knew it from books, seeing the painting in the real changed my life again - as Matisse so often has done for me. (Red Studio, Romanian Blouse, Window at Collioure 1911, The Moroccans- so many of his paintings have had great lasting impact on me.

For the first time I tried drawing out the whole image to scale on tracing paper, rather than directly on to the block, and used a laser cutter to make a line plate in great detail. This was partly because I wanted to use the lines as an arras to butt colour up to with other panels inked as flat colour scaled to size to the drawing. It was a mad clunky way of working, trying to morph two disparate mediums, while trying to morph to take on photographs of family in the kitchen and concertina time, creating narratives in pictures within a picture that were non-sequential. It was a technical challenge and we learnt a lot! - TH