Toast and birds...

So Thursday and Friday both saw the now much anticipated changing of the board as it has come to be known by the locals of Pimlico, with some people traveling from as far as Victoria to witness the grand sight!
Ok so that's not entirely true, people do stand and watch while the prints go up though but usually in pairs (discounting the group of fruit wielding youths mind as here were four of them). An old gent sidled up to the board whilst i put up Thursdays t'oast themed board and said "I've been thinking the very same thing, but you've really nailed it. Wonderful!". I'm not entirely sure what he meant, whether he had been thinking "people should eat toast...everyday!" or something akin to that i will never know as i merely said thanks and he trundled off on his bike chortling to himself. Nice chap. Here's the print in question:




It came about from me wanting to make a print that was an advert but advertised nothing by way of a brand or product, like how we used to get ads for eggs and milk. It could have been anything i guess but then i found an old Hovis ad which featured the insanity of a child who appeared to be emerging from some toast and that, as they say, was that. That and i really like toast. It's really, really good.

Friday's print then. I have a stock pile of images. They are in a series of boxes and folders, in no particular order or category. They are things i have found, been given, pulled out of magazines etc. Occasionally i will leaf through them and suddenly something jumps out and it finds it s way into a piece of work. I work in a similar way with the objects that end up in my work. I seem to have to have them for a while, to allow them to just be, before i consider they could become something else, to play a part in my making.
Anyway that is what happened with The Family Tree of Birds print. It is taken from a Pelican book on Psychology that i used for one of my Hole In One drawings which involve drawing the same circle repeated until it eats through the surface/object it is being drawn on. Before i made the drawing however i flicked through the book and pulled out maybe three pages that stood out. This was one of them. I liked how it seemed to say almost nothing and was also rather striking to look at. I found it the other day and decided it should be given new life on MFB. I wanted to inject some colour so i set about trying to find links between the birds that were more abstract then species or breed (band names or nouns for instance) and yet not immediately obvious to the viewer, and then colour coding them but without the key. I like the idea of allowing for play to an extent. Here's the result: