Gimme It Easy 1
Both Gimme It Easy prints deal with male and female relationships. This print specifically is about infidelity. The man explains changed circumstances to his downcast current partner while the new woman looks on expectantly in the background.

This print marked a departure technically and aesthetically from the previous prints primarily with the elaborate collaging of different source material. The foreground figures are from an early James Bond film (an irony given Bond's notorious womanising) and the bikini-ed woman was from a calendar. The original sources were photographed with a 35mm camera and enlarged onto orthographic graphic arts film with an ordinary home enlarger. The various photographic elements were then contour cut with the emulsion scraped or retouched and finally glued to acetate sheets and registered according to colour. The results were always unpredictable and further modifications to the screen were not unusual.

The use of multiple panels was partly due to the availability of smaller screens and squeegees and partly an aesthetic decision. You will notice in several prints slight (deliberate) discontinuities between the panels.

Gimme It Easy 2
Another relationship theme (the title of the print refers to the desire for a friction free relationship) this time dealing with domestic issues, specifically slovenliness. Again the imagery is borrowed from an old James bond film as the Sean Connery character enters his girlfriend's parlour to find clothes and perfume bottles strewn over the room.

This print for the first time employed collaged materials, an example is the man's suit printed on calico. Also tried for the first time is an eye popping colour palette which is quite natural to screenprinting inks.

Cool Clones
This print was made when I rented a studio in the central business district of Melbourne. It was the classical artist's garret but the view was shiny new high rise and a cappuccino in the cafe downstairs meant rubbing shoulders with the office workers in their suits and ties.

Interestingly this image spoke particularly to people who felt victim to corporate dress code and environment. A journalist visiting the studio to write about artist's studios in Melbourne straight off saw a hook for her article with this image as did a Public Relations woman who bought a print feeling that it depicted precisely what she had to escape from.

The building I think is the Tel Aviv Hilton copied from a book about corporate design and branding. The image was was reversed and spliced to the correct copy to form the arc that seems to wrap around and embrace the brylcreamed clones.

Expresso Expression
This is the obverse of the Cool Clones. These unhappy looking guys wear black tee-shirts instead of the crisp white collar and tie of the Clones. The building (once more the Tel Aviv Hilton) is named Hotel Existenzia - a sort of house of doom.

The references are a weird melange of Beatnik symbols, i.e. the black clothes and black coffee, and the 1950's counterculture embrace of Existential philosophy wrapped in a Roman Noir/Film Noir fatalism.

Formal Hit
Formal hit also has obscure references, this time about the art world. The formal refers to Formalist Colour Field painting much beloved in the 1970's but virtually forgotten now. The type of art in question is visible on the wall in the right hand corner while it's creator, the dude in the glasses and without his shirt tucked in speaks to a buyer/dealer sort of guy just back from overseas while the woman looks on noncommittally. Appropriately the characters were borrowed from a Jean Luc Godard film.

International Smooth
International Smooth continues the investigation of bland generic furniture and design. However the treatment is quite the opposite, this print with bits of textured paper crudely taped to the surface and overprinted with leaking and rupturing stencils is the antithesis of good screenprinting technique and is anything but smooth. It does sum up nicely the transience and tackiness of much modernism. The figures come from a Letraset (Instant Lettering) catalogue are grossly distorted through the high degree of enlargement and have the appropriate everyman/woman anonymity.

3-Fazed
The scale of 3-Fazed (30 x 40 inches) is at the upper limit of manual screenprinting. Together with Electric Noir (below) these prints approach the scale of painting and simply become impractical for storage and framing without having any distinct advantages.

As with Electric Noir electricity powering vast internal environments is a theme, it's all here, a sea of fluorescent lighting, the coffee machine and a ostensibly happy trio of instant lettering stereotypical office workers.

Electric Noir
Electric Noir, Voluptuousness, Calm and Luxury '82 and Feral Ground were all inspired by the great 1960's film noir Point Blank and actor Lee Marvin. Electric Noir thematically is a continuation of the mall/office synthetic environment theme overlaid with a sense of unease sliding into menace.

The term Electric Noir is meant to be ambiguous, it could mean electric night/darkness or have more literary connotations. The duality extends to one panel being in obscuring, enveloping darkness and the other panel in the sort of desaturating over lit ambience of a 7-11 convenience store. As in real life in a modern metropolis neither offers much comfort.

Voluptuousness, Calm and Luxury '82
The title is borrowed from a Henri Matisse painting from his fauve period. Modern advertising offers to deliver these moods but modern life thwarts them or offers a tackier version. What we get is a scene of budding romance in Big John's car yard, the woman stroking the puppy on the guy's lap but maybe thinking about stroking his dick while he eyeballs her breasts. Matisse would have hated it.

Modern life had thwarted me as well when my house was broken into and the photographic gear I used for the screenprints was stolen. Being without the means to replace this stuff I took it as a sign to move on to a different medium and this print was the first woodcut that I made. I found the medium hard going and after producing a small quantity of work I moved on to making collages.

Feral Ground
The alternative title to this print is He Wants, He Squeezes. It was the 1980's and public life was beginning to harden and the right-wing ethos about relishing earning vast quantities of money by whatever means was starting to be seen as natural and good. The language used in this work, i.e. stimulus>action came from the Behavioural philosophy about our part of the brain called the Lizard Brain which was held responsible for primitive behaviour.

Feral Ground is unique in the use of the vertical format. It's a format I have always felt uncomfortable using and therefore avoided but in this instance it's arguably a series of horizontal sheets. This print also used abstract elements that refuse to resolve into comprehensible forms and it was a practice I made widespread use of in later work. It was partially a consequence of the limitations of the woodcutting method I used, hence it was easier to allow peripheral elements to coalesce into formlessness rather than struggle to render these things with any verisimilitude.

Syn-pac Syntax
This was the final work that dealt with corporate issues. It came about when a major Australian bank underwent a major re-branding and renaming. The bank became known as Westpac and I recall being nonplussed about the choice of name. Would I be drawn to use a product with a name like that? No way.

We're saturated with this this sort of crap these days and nobody would give a nanosecond of attention to a company offering rather dorky caps branded with the logo of your choice. The man in the sidebars of this print came from such an advertisement and I was pleased that the figure ended up having a sort of cop/security guard like countenance. We can rest peacefully with him guarding our barren treasures.