Browsing through the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open access section, I stumbled accross a set of prints by Oskar Schlemmer called “Spiel mit Köpfen“.
The way he interlaced the different shapes of all those heads appealed to me immediately. It reminded me of my approach of layering different shapes and objects digitally and recombining them into a new subject. Apparently the printing technique that he used is quite special:
“By drawing a blade across a toothbrush saturated with lithographic ink, the ink is spattered onto the lithographic stone in a random pattern of variously sized dots. By controlling the fine spray of droplets, transparent forms and a wide tonal range can be obtained.”
https://www.clevelandart.org/art/2000.120.3
I thought I’d give it a shot and so I assembled four of the prints into one print in Photoshop by using the different blending modes. I ended up using only 4 of the 6 available prints.
The source tiff files are really great, the resolution is excellent, and all the files are exactly the same size. I did snap them together so that the top edges and corners align as closely as possible.
As a next step I mixed in a black and white photo, something I like to do a lot. There’s so many really great early photographies that are free to use on the internet. This one I got from the Los Angeles County of Art’s Open Access repository. It is titled “Malabar Hill – Panorama of Bombay from Ladies’ Gymkhana”
And below you can see what I produced in the end. I think I took inspiration from the whole “printing” process. I wanted to see those heads printed on top of the photo with the sailing boat. The inclusion of that little fishing boat and coast line gives the picture a whole different twist.
Personally I like the framed boat without the heads being properly visible the most. I don’t think I would have come up with that specific visual without having gone through those different previous iterations.
