Mode 2: Armchair

« Straight outta Lockdown / The Freedom Prints » is a series of Mode 2 vintage prints (from the mid 2000s to the early 2010s), hand-painted or hand-sprayed in 2020 and 2021, and re-numbered in very limited runs.

"Armchair" is part of the third wave of Mode 2 print re-releases. 

« Armchair started out as a red ballpoint pen sketch, in one of my larger old blackbooks. It then went through quite a few different representations, before it became an edition of 40 silkscreen prints at Lazarides Rathbone, back in November 2010, alongside “Bremen Couple” and a few others; such as Umbrella Ecke Münzstraße” and “Stockings” 

In October 2004, I had a solo show above The Dragon Bar, on St. Leonard's Street, called “A Matter Of Taste”, where I had made erotic pastel sketches on wallpaper supplied by Brunschwig & Fils, pasted on wooden panels. I had done a cleaner version of Armchair for this, but, looking back; maybe I should have found something less heavy than wood.

No idea where those panels are, after several POW studio moves.

Late 2010, when Steve Lazarides had moved from Greek Street to Rathbone, he got a print studio set up in the basement of the gallery, where Sarah, who I mentioned before, was putting work in and work out with real quality.

She suggested using a semi-transparent textured polyester drafting film called True Grain, which you could do ANYTHING opaque on, and this could be directly flashed onto a silkscreen. The highlights and brushed shading on ALL these series with a beige background were done using this technique; something that I should maybe try again in the future.

Once the prints had been done, I flew back over to London, to paint each and every one of them by hand, applying the Lascaux acrylics colours that had also been used for the screen-printing itself .

So when I recovered all this old stock last year, I thought that any re-release would HAVE to mean adding yet another texture, in order to enich what we already had. This is where the spray-paint came in, with its own “controlled randomness” of splatter, in colours as close as possible to the acrylics previously used. » Mode 2

Mode 2

"Armchair"

3-colour hand-embellished screen print on Somerset 280 g/sm

Originally printed in 2010 by Lazarides

Hand-sprayed with 3 spray colours in 2021

56 x 76 cm

4 deckle edges

Edition of 33

Signed