Welcome to the Cabaret | Making of

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We're not using traditional screen printing inks. We're using oil paints.

[00:00:03]We're using oil paints from my studio.

[00:00:04]So, it's the exact same oil paints that I use on my canvases. Um, so we're pushing the oil paint through the screen. And then as soon as they're ready, I grab them and start working on the on the on the completed screen print. I'm employing the same kind of techniques and tools that I use in the studio. like I'm using brushes, I'm using squeegees, I'm using uh rags to drag the paint, I'm spraying solvent on it on the print to dissolve the oil paint. So, it very much is replicating my own practice in the studio. I didn't really know what to expect. Like, the beauty of a one color screen print is that you get all the information down straight away. It's all down in one hit, all down in one layer. So, the image is there. It's it's finished. Um, so then it allows me a lot of freedom to get stuck in. I'll do this and then we're going to move on.

[00:00:53]>> And then because what might be nice is this kind of streaky motion from the blacks.

[00:00:57]>> Yeah.

[00:00:58]>> And then wherever the whites are, I could potentially go in and just like take off some of the light areas.

[00:01:04]>> So, welcome to the Cabaret was the largest painting in my recent solo show at Ben Brown here in London a couple of months back. Um, it was a, you know, really large 3 meter canvas. I thought it would be um a good a good painting to work with for this series. Um I also like the idea of taking paintings that are so kind of full of color and saturation and taking removing that completely just to see how they see how it works in black and white and black and white often works works well for me in the studio as well.

[00:01:37]>> I remember a story when I was in art college in Limmerch. Uh, one of my tutors had spent um some time in New York in the 1960s working with Robert Rousenberg and his job was to run into one of the newspaper uh printing plants, grab the papers fresh off the press while the inks were still wet and run across to Rousenberg studio so that they could print the wet ink from the newspapers directly onto the canvas. Uh, I always loved that story and I loved this the urgency and the immediiacy of that process. So I often wondered would it be an interesting thing to try to replicate in some way in my own practice.

[00:02:14]>> Okay. So this this is one of the first ones that I did. So it's a bit heavier than the others and there isn't any color added to it. So I was just interacting with the with the with the print itself and I didn't add anything to it. Um but you can see here where I was trying to take off a lot of the information and letting the I was kind of spraying solvents to let it run and get a bit more of a ghostly effect. Then up here I was just using like rags and just trying to kind of mash it up a lot more. Um they're not so much handfinished prints because I often find that maybe a hand finished print is kind of painting on top. It's it's a it's it's separating the two processes. It's you get your print and then you know sometime later you start working on top with with oils or with whatever. Whereas these was this this process was very much um a blend of the two. So that's how I look at it really. When the when the print came off the press, it was this kind of perfect image. Everything was in the right place. And then I um I got stuck in