Repetition was created from an audio wave of a screen being pulled in the screen printing process.
A screen print is made often of some 20 colours, built up from CMYK process paints. Each layer has to be manually colour balanced, layered up, and hand pulled, to create the final print. That’s 20 pulls per image, and editions can run in to the hundreds, so thousands of the same, repeat, simple process, to make these beautiful prints. I have found how manual, labour intensive and how human the screen printing process is, in the age of digital, factories, AI and ease, inspiring and fascinating since taking my studio room in a fine art printers.
I wanted to build up an image from smearing together CMYK process colours, with a pattern that repeats across the canvas. Painting the background with a rough texture but then plotting the pattern with paints shines a light on the human, the digital, and the nature of repeat processes.
The original audio clip from Repetition is here:
This was then run through an FFT in a Processing sketch, and I captured a frame that I liked as an SVG, which then formed the basis of the painting.
The video below shows more of the process when I was making a study, before the final piece.