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WORDS Tom Lordan That said, Flanagan is keen to p
oint out that this transmission isn’t only one way: in many instances, the artistic practice of the visitors is greatly enhanced by their experience at the Graphic Studio. “When artists make prints, they work differently. Have you ever made a print? Think about etching: with an etching, you work on your plates. In painting, you make marks and colour choices as you paint. In etching, you make marks, but colour choices come later. You’re drawing and etching in acid, creating lines. For a colour plate print with four plates, you decide which plate is yellow, red, or blue, but your colour choices aren’t made yet. When you print it, you realise you can swap colours, altering the effect. It opens your mind to exploring colours and layering in a different way: people have told me that their experience of print-making changed the way they work.” This tension between the processual features of print and an artist’s established visual practice is nowhere more evident, as a principle motivating the exploration of new modes of expression, than in the works by Cian McLoughlin. McLoughlin is best known for his impressionistic portraits of well-known Irish cultural figures, like Brian Friel and Michael Gambon, and his more recent work in abstraction, which reference the mood and ambient energy of crowds. Cristín Leach, on the opening of McLoughlin’s 2021 exhibition at the Molesworth Gallery, wrote that in, “the crowd, anonymity, individuality and belonging jostle. McLoughlin’s latest paintings dive into that space.” McLoughlin is still exploring this territory, and in the course of the VAP, produced two major editions: Stack Overflow and Madness and the Cure for Madness. In the former, plumes of white and shades of blue disperse into one another, a cloud-mass that is striated, strikingly, by brightly coloured columns, like strips of hyaline tape. In the latter, hues of red predominate, creating a porous bulk, as though one could pass through it, becoming saturated in its latent emotional charge. McLoughlin’s editions (a print-making term that refers to the entire series of prints created from one single image) were then used by the artist as the framework for further experimentation: the Graphic Studio team produced five additional prints in each edition, and sent them to the artist’s studio. McLoughlin worked on each one, creating five new iterations, intervening on the base-image with layers of paint. The artist favoured the use of what are known as ‘oil bars’, a solid blend of oil, wax and pigment, which, intriguingly, hadn’t yet completely dried, even at the stage I saw them, just prior to being framed. In addition to McLoughlin’s ‘post-edition paintings’ (also referred to as ‘monoprints’), Richard Gorman has produced several beautiful wood-block prints that feature the artist’s signature handmade Japanese paper; Mark Francis’s fluid and geometric prints refer to the qualities and representational tropes of sound-waves and oscillographs; and Taffina Flood’s new work captures the same vibrancy of her regular painted work on canvass, where the artist creates large, joyful abstracts that seem to almost sing with colour. A provocative, entertaining show of contemporary print works, that once again demonstrates the resurgent interest in and momentum behind print-making in Dublin in the last number of years. Top: Richard Gorman Below: Taffina Flood, Sum of Parts The Visiting Artists Programme is on at the Graphic Studio Gallery on Cope Street in Temple Bar until November 18. graphicstudiodublin.com 49