Spencer Brown-Pearn

Due to popular demand by our readers, The Overture followed up with an artist we briefly featured in January;  Spencer Brown-Pearn.

Pearn takes paintings and transforms them through photography, Photoshop and screen-printing.

He is an Arts & Humanities senior at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD).

Fast Paintings

I sketch and write notes so I don’t forget what’s floating in my head but execution of an idea takes a while. A month into the (Fall 2010) semester I looked back at my notes and saw one about fast paintings.

I started doing fast paintings, which is translating feelings or thoughts into quick strokes. I do not spend more than 30 seconds per painting.

It wasn’t thought out strokes. I tried to think of nothing at all when painting. I wanted to capture unconscious thought at the moment I’m painting without outside influences.

So I thought feelings are influenced by  history, not just a your subconscious. Whatever your fleeting thought is at the moment is influenced by the 1,000 thoughts before it.

That’s what started the documentation of the history of a painting. I would finish a fast painting, take a photograph of it then gesso over the canvas and paint a new one. The final painting has blobs and bits of the paintings beneath it coming through the front.

I wanted to see what would happen if I kept taking the idea further, translating a feeling caught in a fast painting through Photoshop and screen printing. I wanted to see how something that can be pulled up online translates through from my original feeling. The process of running the photographs through Photoshop and blowing them up significantly larger than they were taken changes how the idea is perceived. I am taking a photograph that’s measured in an inch by inch ratio and blowing it up to two feet by two feet with a high dpi so you can see all the jagged ink marks.

Rorschach Paintings

When I did the paintings what was most interesting to me was how quick they were.

My professor, John Pomara, put them up in the 2010 Fall Festival and people were coming up to me and telling me they liked them. The paintings were so simple but when you asked people what it was of they said ‘I don’t know.’

I was not trying to paint particular shapes or lines; I say that my paintings are influenced by calligraphy because that is what they look like but not what they were intended as. I’ve never done calligraphy.

It’s interesting that everyone can look at these black strokes of paint and see something different.

Adventurous Print-making

I think print-making lends itself to being adventurous. You take one screen with an image burned onto it and reuse it so many times. You can take a slow-moving, calculated thought process and push it through a medium that yields rapid results. It is a contradiction and that makes it interesting.

Economy

When people ask me why I don’t pursue a ‘real job’ major I tell them what Greg Metz said in an interview once, which is ‘Art is everything around you.’

Yea, you can go and get a real job that’s important  and the state of the economy is important but I think it is just as important to create and put something into the world. To say that a job with a desk is somehow more important is blind.

How to screen print

The image is reproduced on a thin piece of paper or a transparency and exposed to a screen:

Put emulsion on the screen and place it in a vacuum/light box.

The light box transfers the image from the transparency to the screen.

Transparent areas are blocked and the image is burned into the screen as a negative.

After placing a piece of paper behind the screen, cover it in ink and pull a wide squeegee across it.

The squeegee pushes the ink through the screen.

If the screen has ink from earlier use on it, or not coated with enough, the image is not uniformly reproduced. The gallery below shows 27 of Pearn’s screen-prints (documenting the history of one painting), all of which he characterizes as ‘mistakes’ from improperly pulling ink across the screen.