Making 100 screen prints in 100 days is no easy task, as it means that each day requires new inspiration and a great deal of patience to create. At this year's London Design Festival in September, British color artist Sophie Smallhorn brought her 100 days of work together in the exhibition "100 Prints," which became the "queue" of the entire festival. Sophie Smallhorn has brought her 100 days of work together into the exhibition "100 Prints", which has become the "queue" of the entire festival.

According to Sophie, 100 Prints was created with the intention of giving people the freedom to play with their ideas without restrictions. And, unlike other commissions, the project's expectations and requirements can be defined as she sees fit. For example, any work that appears to be wrong is accepted and retained, and attempts are made to improve or salvage it afterwards. In this way, one can not only see her exploration of the relationship between color, volume and proportion, but also get a glimpse of how she finds solutions with experimental thinking and new possibilities of composition when confronted with mistakes, thus exploring the topic of creative continuity.

In addition, she also needed to give some thought to the rhythm of the 100 prints. "Although each print is disposable and stands alone, each exhibition is an opportunity to see these prints as a complete story." As a result, the 100 prints are not presented randomly in the exhibition; rather, they are all arranged in the order in which they were made. Each print is a continuation of a previous work and informs the next. "Despite the differences in when each work was made, they are all equal and important, in terms of size and price." Sophie says.

In this work, she experimented with many new shapes, but also allowed some familiar ones to be used again and again. As for the choice of colors, she laughs that it was definitely a tug-of-war. "Because every creator always has a comfort zone, I need to remind myself of it again and again and force myself to move away from it to introduce colors that might be more challenging and 'awkward'." "The work takes shape by balancing familiar colors with tricky ones. In this way, the overall vision of a print has the potential to carry different color meanings and upset the balance between those colors." She explains.

Interestingly, the choice of "simple" and "tricky" colors, she says, still has its "limits": the colors Sophie uses depend on solid pigments, not on computer-generated data in quaternary (CMYK) or trichromatic (RGB) mode. She finds it difficult to select colors through CAD (computer-aided design) because she would be out of touch with them. According to Sophie, "I just know how to mix pigments until they are what I need."

This approach to design can be attributed to the "mix" of wood, metal, plastic and ceramics that she took at Brighton University. Such a combination of disciplines no longer exists today, but at the time it gave her effective exposure to a wide range of creative fields and the opportunity to experiment with everything - and color, too. She explains, "For me, color has endless possibilities, and I never tire of its potential. My work is really just a tool to 'capture' color, and the focus, still, is to create a system to tell a color story." So it is that her artistic career has evolved from the early days of woodworking "slash" to public installation art, home decor design, and into the screen prints of today.

In fact, if you look at the "100 prints" in order, you can't help but feel like a "running light". Even if the prints are "flat," their visuality is reminiscent of Donald Judd's sculptures; or, with their strong color mix, they bear some resemblance to the rise of Malevich and his Suprematism in 1915. The paintings are somewhat similar to those of Malevich and his Suprematism. Of course, it is important to mention that the premise of 100 Prints was originally based on Sophie's "Cube" sculptures.

Works such as Square 3 and Square 4, which were recently included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in the United Kingdom, blur the boundary between freestanding sculpture and two-dimensional painting by being displayed against a wall (rather than on a platform). The two sculptures, made of aluminum, polyurethane panels and acrylic and covered with saturated colors, actually maximize the subtle relationship between colors when white (or a white wall) is used as a background, just as the print does, allowing the different colors and geometric components to prompt absorption between colors when juxtaposed and overlapped, thus revealing an inherently 3D nature.

What ultimately leaves one wondering is what these 100 works will look like at the end of the exhibition. As the saying goes, "There's no such thing as a banquet," so the feast of color and form that is "100 Prints" will be "dissolved" with the post-exhibition sale. Although the prints will be going around the world, Sophie is pleased and pleased that people who have purchased them often return to buy new prints to add to their home. Thus 100 Prints has clearly created an invisible and loyal fan base.

Article Source:艺术与设计

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