BB pal Coop is "paintblogging" the creation of his latest artwork. For this piece, he decided to hand paint a representation of the muddy, blurred dots used as shading in halftone printing. From his blog post at Positive Ape Index:
I have a halftone fetish. I'm not sure why, maybe looking at too many old comic books and xeroxed punk 'zines as a kid. Whatever the reason, there is something about those little black dots that drives me wild, particularly when the printed result is muddy and imperfect, when those perfect black circles have metastasized into ugly imperfect blobs on a yellowed piece of newsprint.
When I started on (my last series) Parts With Appeal, I spent several weeks poring through my old car mags, scanning tiny ads for compelling examples of just what I'm talking about. I kept trying to figure out a way to reproduce those blotchy halftones at the large scale of my canvas. I thought about Warhol's method of silkscreening on canvas, but I wanted to keep myself honest, and find a method that was more time-consuming and pain-in-the-asstastic.
Roy Lichtenstein had a stencil method for painting halftones on canvas, but that seemed too precise for the look I wanted, and I didn't want the result to look like his work, anyway. Dali also used halftones in his later paintings, but I've read conflicting stories as to whether they were painted by hand or reproduced mechanically, and i've never seen any of these paintings in person to judge for myself.
I finally decided there was only one way to pull it off properly, and that was just to paint the whole damn thing by hand, one dot at a time.
Previously on BB:
• Coop's new painting, step-by-step Link
• Paint by blog with Coop Link
• Coop's timelapse painting slideshows Link
