Screen Printing

When working on my Jaleo oil paintings, my artist friend Liliana Márquez wondered about the amount of time that I was "wasting" painting the same pattern over and over again using the same color values. She suggested that I find a way to simplify the process so I could explore form, color, symmetry, rotation and reflection before I turn 95.

Liliana, being a zero waste designer and pop artist, suggested that I explore a new media: screen printing. Her Zero Waste duende showed up when she said:

"Es mejor no comprar más mierda de plástico para hacer plantilla. Ahora con la tecnología que tenemos y los residuos industriales de los que disponemos constantemente, podemos inventar nuevos procesos artísticos."

(It is best not to buy more plastic crap to cut out stencils. With the technology we have now and the industrial waste that is constantly available to us, we can invent new artistic processes.)

So Liliana used a plotter to cut out the form of a JPG image of a series of dancers onto a vinyl paper roll that she found in the trash in the industrial park next to her work. One Thursday evening, she arrived at my home studio carrying all types of dirty and semi rotten vinyl rolls with random logos advertising what seemed like errors in the process of printing. She also brought an old wooden screen print frame with several holes that she had adopted from an arts recycling store. "No oil painting", she said. "Let's try acrylics".

With a metal scalpel blade, we carved out the geometric forms that were selected to receive the paint through the silk screen and invented new shapes to show the lines of the body and the dress of the dancer against the background. Then we placed the vinyl cuts onto adhesive paper and allowed the vinyl to adhere to it by pressing it with a wooden kitchen spoon. When we removed the vinyl, the adhesive paper held the selected geometric figures that we had carved out with the scalpel. We then placed the adhesive paper on the silk screen frame, pressed hard to allow the vinyl to stick to the screen and then peeled the adhesive paper off, leaving what looked like a sticker stencil of the perplexed dancer. We used the saved geometric cutlets that we had cut out with the scalpel to cover the many gaps created by the lines of the plotter on the reused vinyl.

"Let's try a strong color", said Lili. We went for red. We poured the paint and moved it up and down with the wooden squeegee until we were sure it had travelled through the silk. It was a beautiful disaster!

The paint had not travelled evenly, the recycled vinyl expressed itself by showing traces of the paint where it was meant to be blank because we hadn't covered all the plotter lines from the reused vinyl. The red volume, however, was quite striking!

Liliana, in my opinion, was right on one thing and wrong on another: we can and should use recycled materials and technology to invent new artistic processes; these artistic processes that incorporate recycled or reused components may, however, demand more time from us and also the recuperation of many craft working skills that we might have put aside in lieu of new materials and technology. Zero Waste doesn't mean Zero Time, but rather Good Old Times! What a beautiful and retrograde 21st century zero waste eco-conundrum!

After many beautiful errors, I was able to have some control over the silk screen printing process and this Zero Waste approach to my exploration of Jaleos.

As I became more comfortable with the scalpel, the wooden squeegee, the consistency and texture of acrylic paint when exposed to air, the time consuming parts of some parts of the process and the extraordinary speed required at some phases too, I started to see the forms that I was hoping for. I noticed that each piece was different from the rest in color value, texture and composition. I also noticed that I could only print about 15 pieces on each vinyl and screen before the paint dried and blocked the pores or the vinyl detached from the screen. Out of those 15 pieces, 5 were usually tests in preparation for the right paint consistency and another 5 were errors of composition, incorrect pressure with the squeegee or a false move with the paper under the screen. I saved those errors for reuse.

The work that you see here is the result of months of testing and an effort to use recycled materials in the process... also to finally use to those old almost empty paint tubes!

When I went back to work on my Jaleo oil paintings, I was able to appreciate the time that the wetness of the oil paint grants you to focus on the color values, the form, the composition and the texture.

This tension between Time and Desire reminded me of Federico García Lorca's Legend of Time again:

"If Dream pretends to build walls

on the plains of Time,

Time will make Dream believe

that it is being born at that same moment"

Thank-you Liliana Márquez for stirring this ruckus and encouraging this Jaleos.

*All of the following Jaleos are silk screen prints with acrylic paint on a 11X14 canvas paper placed on a 16X20 paper frame