How screenprinting took over my life

This is the story of how I became a printmaker.

Let’s Start by rewinding to the late 90s. I have just graduated with a visual arts (Licence d’Arts Plastiques) from a Paris university (PARIS 1 Pantheon Sorbonne). At that point, I was already living in London, having done the last year of my degree as a long-distance course, simply travelling back to Paris for exams.

At this point my arts practice was falling by the wayside a bit- I had got a job as a market research interviewer, and would stay in that industry for the next two decades. More importantly, I struggled to decide what was the point of making art- what could I have to say that was so important and had not been said before?

So for twenty years, I didn’t paint or create much. I doodled in meetings, on phone calls, whenever i had a pen in my hand and a piece of paper in front of me, but that was pretty much it.

And then everything changed.

In the years around my 40th birthday, I was dealt a number of blows by life. I won’t go into much details, but in a short time it I faced some health issues, lost my dad and other every day catastrophes… It was a perfect storm of problems and it made me reassess my place in the world, and the shape I wanted my life to have.

The big hole inside my life was creativity- I had abandoned what had been so essential to me in my early twenties- an output for my experiences and feelings, a way of bearing witness to my life and that of those around me, a way to comment on the world and my inner thoughts, a place to develop imaginary worlds and languages.

I thought for a while about how I could bring it back. Could I find a job related to my market research experience but with a bit more of a creative element, perhaps in branding or advertising? Should I learn about graphic design or illustration, and get involved in creating visuals for books, campaigns, logos? Could I create my own art and try and make a living from it?

Almost randomly, incidentally , I  booked myself on a course on screen printing. I had some digital artworks and some charcoal drawings I was thinking of trying to sell, and it seemed like a better way to give them life than simply getting giclée copies printed by a professional outfit.

And i fell in love with it.

I got mucky, covered in ink from head to toes. I got tired, pulling and pushing the squeegee, moving screens around, washing and drying them, but at the end of that first day I had about ten one-layer prints based on an old photo and I was in love.

I did a second workshop soon after , to learn more about preparing the artwork for printing, and about multi-layers work, and I still loved it.

After that (and after a brief delay while I was having brain surgery; thank you, life!), I signed up to the studio I had done the workshop in and I started to learn on my own.

I made every single mistake in the book. I didn’t expose my screens long enough, or I exposed them too long and the design didn’t come across as it should on the screen; I struggled to clean them well, letting the ghosts of past prints interfere with the current artwork; I left ink to dry on my screen or I pushed too much through onto the paper, ruining countless prints; I misregistered my layers and ended up with double vision looking at my work; I tore my screens more than once and even got a tear in someone else’s once; 

I spent many days frustrated by my lack of progress, and not being able to get the prints to look how I wanted but it never made me want to stop printing, I just wanted to get better, and slowly I did.

It became the centre of my art practice, and I shaped my whole life around it. I had found my place.

The other thing that I discovered is that I was never short of ideas for what to print. Whenever I am printing one piece, I am already planning what I want to print next, and the work I produce always pales in comparison in my mind against the print I intend to work on next. I am always excited for my next print.

There is an often quoted line by Jean Genet about how “on n’est pas artiste sans qu’un grand malheur s’en soit mêlé” (we are not artists without a great tragedy having been involved), and for me that was partly true. I had learned about art as a student, I had tools and knowledge at my disposal but I wasn’t an artist yet, because I didn’t have something to say, until I faced some hard times and until I discovered my medium. Then I faced these things, learned a technique and suddenly I had found my voice too.