Ghost Cities

A while ago I was looking for new ways of including text into my monotypes. While I was generally happy with transfer monotype method I always used before (where you basically use a lithographic process), it often was rather unpredictable and I wanted to have more control. I did some research and came across a comparatively new way of printmaking – gel printing. In the end it did not provide the reliable ways of printing text the way I hoped, but it offered a new and exciting avenue for experimenting with color and shapes.

While it would never replace my monotype process, it proved to be somewhat addictive and exciting. It is a very versatile medium. I primarily ended up using it for producing backgrounds for my (upcoming) book of mixed media collages.

At some moment of my book I needed an image of a far away city that is in ruins. For my purposes the image needed to be fairly general, abstract and somewhat flat, so I decided to use gel plate. One of the fun things you can do with gel plate is using various found objects to make impressions, and for my cities I used anything I could find that would give me a geometric shape: discarded plastic food packaging, strawberries containers, corrugated cardboard, etc. It became a fun fun fun exercise of using abstraction and limited color palette, so I made several prints that were just experiments, some free floating associations on the theme of Ghost Cities.