Artist talk presented by the Printmaker's Association of Western Australia (PAWA) and hosted by the Moore's Building Contemporary Art Gallery in Fremantle, Western Australia.
This talk was given on Sat 4 Dec, 2021 in reaction to the theme of the group show: Body of Work. My talk was about my exhibited monotype series. Please note that this talk was filmed in a heritage building that functions as a cafe and an open floor plan gallery. While the sound quality is basic, please enjoy the subtitles!
More photos and artworks from the show can be found on my Instagram: @DenLScheer
TRANSCRIPT OF ARTIST TALK
Please note that subtitles are approximate due to the poor audio quality. This artist talk was hosted by the Printmaker’s Association of Western Australia (PAWA) on Dec 4, 2021 at the Moore’s Building Contemporary Art Gallery in Fremantle.
Thankyou to the ladies who volunteered to record with my phone for me.
HOST: Good morning!
HOST: Good morning everybody and thankyou for coming out and to the talks. I want to introduce you to Den Scheer. She’s not exhibited with us before. Her monotype series, presented here in front of you, engages the fluidity of the media to explore the movement of animals.
DEN: Hello everyone, I’m Den Scheer and my works here are some monotypes. Does everyone know what a monotype is roughly?
DEN: It’s kind of like reverse finger painting if you’ve never done it before. So you get a plate and roll ink on it, and all the white bits have been rubbed off with rag with my hands and then that’s printed on the white paper underneath. It’s a very fluid and plastic way of working depending on how thick you make the ink and the texture and tack of the ink, you can get different depths. If you thin it a lot, you get a really crisp line and if you leave it a bit tacky, you can get more tones developing in it.
The ways these are done is I draw with light. For the printer’s out there, I use a very velvety tack. I don’t use a high tack on my monotypes. It’s more like the first time you prime a woodcut and that’s because that gives me space to work with light. If you’re not a printmaker, it’s like if you spill something sticky on a bench- when you first wipe it off it comes off easy, whereas if you leave it longer you start struggling. That’s the difference.
That means you can get, especially in this one and this one, different tonality in the greys. These prints are also, for those who are interested, printed on Rochdale (actually Rochling) German plastic and that actually has a texture. In that when you work on velveteen you get a grip and it doesn’t slide around like you would with the white plastic that you get from EPlas.
The theme of the works is looking at mobility and movement. A lot of the work that I do is large scale graphite and that’s quite rigid. Whereas with monotype you can really explore the rhythm of the body and isolate different sections of it and focus on a select musculature and its anatomy rather than looking at the whole. You can reduce it down to elements that are annotised (annotated). The annotations are just working back into it. It’s that process of thought and really wanting to show the presence of thought within the body because a lot of these animals don’t exist. They’re composites. A lot of the work I do with graphite in the Middle East with horses where a leg is in wrong spot or an ear is in the wrong direction. When you work with breeders and their animals they really want it to be perfect. This gives you an opportunity to say, like here, to start figuring out each parts of the body that need to be changed or what I want to work with and build together. So they’re very chimaeric bodies.
Is that the ten minutes?
AUDEINCE: No.
DEN: I’m rambling. If anyone has any questions, please jump in or I’ll keep rambling forever.
AUDIENCE: How much time do you give to work on each?
DEN: In terms of drawing it, these little ones are 20 minutes. These large ones half an hour. So the longest I’ve done is three hours and I can get it like a photo using thicker ink to get that gradation and that’s drawing in light. I draw based on the reflection. The amount of light that reflects back at me tells me how of the ink I’ve rubbed off. The larger ones, yeah three hours but it just depends. It depends on the ink. If the ink’s really thin and it’s hot… You know this little one here is a five minute warm up sketch. So it depends on the weather as well as to how the ink reacts. But that’s the reason for warm up sketches- just trying to get ideas down.
For me you can’t necessarily resolve the artworks, but I prefer to work like an open sketchbook and to work with ideas in the longer term and with repetitions of each concept I work with which is where all of these little notes come in on the legs of the horse.
AUDIENCE: What do you draw with?
DEN: It’s a mixture. So for something like this one with finer details here or on this leg, cotton buds that you just get from the shops or cotton rags. I find cotton is the best absorbant to use as opposed to viscose or something that is plastic based. It doesn’t take the ink up when you move it around either.
And another thing, you know the orange spray from Bunnings (De-Solv-It)? It liquifies this. It’s a favourite degreaser of mine. So if you have a trouble area, just spray a little bit of that on a rag and you can get clean whites easily. You won’t necessarily get a tone but if you want to strip it back then that’s a really good way to go.
AUDIENCE: question is inaudible, but is about the high contrast of the works.
DEN: No, that’s just how I see things. I’m very photo sensitive. I’m one of those people who sneeze at bright lights. So for me, I just see light and dark in extremes naturally. It’s just something that everyone in my dad’s side of the family has. We all sneeze at bright lights. We can’t handle the glare. So this extreme light is just how I see things and even my drawings are like that.
AUDIENCE: You don’t do colour much?
DEN: No, I do a bit of colour. The reason I don’t is I’m actually allergic to paint. I’m even allergic to this ink. My first couple of years at university we didn’t have occupational health and safety (regarding ink to skin contact) and we printed without gloves so now I’m allergic to cobalt. So for these things I have to completely strap up. I need to have a fume mask on or I get very, very sick. I’m more sensitive to the colours because of those chemicals (in terms of pigments). The black does have cobalt in it but it’s just easier to mask. It’s easier on my eyes. It’s a range of different things. And that’s the interesting thing about working with black and white- like Tacita Dean’s chalk drawings, Anish Kapoor’s essays on void- the way that light works with musculature is quite interesting and that is something that I’m looking into as well.
It’s the idea of blackness. But I just like, you know, printmaking the black is a very different black to an oil black or a graphite black. You get depth in it. And then, I mean this paper is Canson. These are all Canson but if you start working with BFK which, for those unfamiliar, is very fluffy and deep, the black changes again in the same ink. The way that the texture allows light to interact with the ink.
Sorry this is a bit more technical for anyone who’s not a print maker.
The reason that I draw the bulls is that we have cattle. So we’ve been breeding for twenty years. We’ve got a 25% hit rate of breeding murray greys as black which is crucial because- you know all of the advertising of angus beef? You actually get a bonus for skin colour at butchers (abattoirs). It’s like two to four hundred dollars but angus have bigger bones and a small amount of meat. Murray greys have a lot of meat and smaller bones which brings less birthing issues. So by breeding them black we get much more money for meat and also a butchering bonus. And that’s where a lot of my interest in genetics, as well as working in the Middle East, comes into it. Which is why a lot of these bulls are composites. Hence why some of them focus on specific parts of anatomy.
AUDIENCE: Question inaudible, but is about where I have travelled to.
DEN: The emirates. Abu Dhabi and Dubai. So some of them, you know, the hindquarters of that horse is pretty developed. Little things like on an animal… We breed a cow with small shoulders for an easy birth but with skinny shoulders you’re not going to get a double eye muscle on the butt which is more valuable. So really working with animals to create things that your breeder knows- the animal as well as possible but others don’t necessarily know. Localised knowledge is also very interesting to me as well and again that comes from genetics.
AUDIENCE: Question inaudible but asking about the annotations.
DEN: That’s just my train of thought for figuring things out. If it’s near a little body, it will be changing anatomy. So this little section here- the angle of the hip is wrong. This horse has stifles. So that hip angle is incorrect anatomically because of the condition it has due to muscle, not wastage, but it’s just wrong within the body. Something like this- these are alternative poses that can’t be put in. A lot of it is “Study of a galloping pony, again from the series of running horse illustrations”.
And the funny thing about the writing is people like it more when they can’t read it. Because when it’s legible people start reading it and they don’t like it. But that’s why it’s in the messiest cursive you’ll ever see because then people can’t read it. People can’t read cursive because it’s a generational thing learning to write cursive. I was taught it but someone younger than twenty five might not know it. It’s like a foreign language that they can’t necessarily translate.
AUDIENCE: So can you write in reverse?
DEN: Yeah, I am partly ambidextrous. So it just depends which hand I use. So some of these artworks- some are done left handed. Some are done right handed. That again as printmaker, as you know, maintaining your joints. Maintaining your elbows and wrists and things like that. For larger sweeps like this one here I can do left handed. I haven’t quite got to finer details left handed yet. It’s that mitigation of RSI that we need to be aware of with this type of artwork.
DEN: Any other questions?
AUDIENCE: Thankyou
DEN: Thankyou.