Claire McVinnie is one of the anchor staff of the DCA’s Print Studio. She teaches. She facilitates. She manages. She helps artists of all skill levels make their print ideas as good as they can be. She’s been doing it for nearly twenty years. She’s an expert technician.

And she’s a printmaker who creates artistic work of great merit.

Her output is limited, partly because her quality control is set high, and she’s not a natural at self promotion, which means that she’s not as widely known as she could be. Her current creative activity might be split into four strands:

She makes distinctive monoprints, pressing real plants; she produces screen prints, etchings and collagraphs with strong images of animals; and she has a Warhol inspired “affordable originals” line of screen printed images of dead celebrities, which she sells under the brand “Popped Icons”. 

Then there are Moroccan prints; a portfolio of images that arrest you wherever they’re exhibited. These works stand out in the crowded print racks through their powerful imagery; distinctive subject matter; and their subtle and yet vibrant colour schemes. They exude heat: blazing sun in big cloudless skies and sultry evenings; and they draw you in to their exotic world with nuances in texture and detail that immediately put you in to a place. These are places that have inspired McVinnie, often fleetingly, as she’s passed through, but she captures the moment and the architecture of the image in a way that suggests an artist with a very strong eye. Then she applies high levels of technique to translate the snapshot into art.

I asked Claire if we could feature some of the prints in Art Scot and if she could talk through her creative processes and give us a back story to explain how they came about.

“ I've been to Morocco a couple of times and travelled around. I'd always wanted to go there, and when I arrived I found that Morocco reminded me so much of my living room! I'd never been there before, but I was so influenced by it. I've got lanterns everywhere, burnt incense all the time inside, and out in my garden; I make juice every day with things like ginger and oranges, and you just go down the street in Morocco and there are people making juice on the streets everywhere, with oranges. Marrakech is called orange-peel city some times, because there is just orange peel everywhere. They live on oranges. So I love that. They burn incense to cover up the smell of rubbish. Not that my house smells, or my garden, but I love incense and lanterns, and horses. I've got an Arab horse myself.”

“I just fell in love with the place. I knew I would like it, but I didn't realise how much at home I would feel when I got there. And I loved the food. Oh yes! I cook with a tagine, and I didn't realise that that's all they cook in. They don't have pots and pans. The tagine: that's their cooking pot. Everything is cooked in there.  And, of course, I love all the colours.”

Had other exotic locations had the same effect? “ Since the Morocco trips, I’ve been to Vietnam and travelled the length of the country, and I haven't produced any images. Not a single thing. I had a great time, but I was not artistically inspired at all. It's really funny. Just nothing.”

“I could go and stay in Morocco for a month and get enough material to make prints for the rest of my life.”

Her two Moroccan odysseys took place three and five years ago. She calls them ‘adventure trips’ and they combined holidaying and riding horses, with artistic inspirations, captured on camera and sketchbook.

Let’s have a look at the pictures. Why don’t we start with “Moroccan Road Trip”?

Moroccan Road Trip

“I was on a bus, going from Marrakech to Essaouira. And these are the colours. So I started off with a colour that seems to be recurring in a lot of my blends. They're quite difficult to do. There's a lot of patience required. But I've spoken to other people who've been to Morocco, and they've agreed that these are typical Moroccan colours, especially in Marrakech. All of the buildings are this pink colour.”

“I've got three colours in this blend, and I just keep printing back and forth on to some cheap newsprint paper until the colours start to blend together.”

“This is a good example that we use with our intermediate screenprinting class, because it's got a photographic element, it's got some drawing elements, some painted elements, and then its got the blend, so it's got a lot of screenprinting techniques in one print.”

The image is based on a photograph, but it’s been simplified.

“Yes I wanted to change it up. I kept the car because I couldn't draw that. It's just great the way it is. I drew and painted all the other elements. It wasn't busy, that's for sure, because it was on a road between two locations that were three hours apart, and this was a middle point. On this side of the road is a row of two or three restaurants and a shop, and the filthiest toilets I have ever, ever, seen; really horrible, and this was just the stop off point where all the buses stop and you can go the toilet, go and get a drink, get fed, whatever you need on the middle of this journey. I think it was fairly empty, but I've probably made it more so. I think there were other bits and pieces in the photograph and I just knocked it back.”

Let’s move on. This one has similarities.

“And this is the destination of the road trip, Essaouira. We have arrived!”

La Plage, Essaouira

This starts again with a photograph.

“Even more so. The rider and the camels. This isn't the part of the beach I was riding on. I was much farther along. This is right beside the town of Essaouira.  And I just love this character here (the rider), because this is his transport. He's not like me, where I go to the beach, get my horse and have fun. This is how he gets about, on this horse. And I just love the fact that he's in his jeans and his Nike trainers and he's wearing a baseball cap, and he's got a rucksack on his back.”

“This was first thing in the morning, and it was in December. It's a funny place at this time of year. I've only been there at that time. It starts off quite cold. You need your quilted jacket on. And then as the day goes on (it gets warmer), and there's one point in the afternoon when you can actually  sunbathe and get a tan, and then it starts getting cooler again. So its quite a good time of the year to go. The rider was fine with what he was wearing then, and maybe in the afternoon, maybe he'd go and change.”

“There are still tourists around . That's what these camels are for. Yes, I just love the beach, because it's really wide, even when the tide is in. There's horses and camels everywhere and these guys are trying to get you to go to take a ride.”

“I knew I was going to do something with this photograph when I was taking it because it was such a beautiful horse in really  good condition. In Marrakech the horses are lame, a bit thin, and this was such a beautiful horse, obviously well looked after”

Back in the print studio, Claire set to work.

“There were more people in the photograph and I took them out. I put in the little bit of horizon, painted in the shadows of the horses and camels. It’s got a photographic element, drawing, painting, and a blend. It was a nightmare trying to cut out all of these camel legs, but I liked the photographic look. I didn’t want to draw them. I really like the result.”

And in the same vein, there’s “Rabat Medina”

Rabat Medina

“This is from Rabat which is further up the coast from Essaouira. This is early evening so the sky is just starting to get dark, and that's exactly how it looked in the photograph, so the lamps and the cables are the photographic part, and then I've tried to paint and draw the buildings, and again I’ve done a blend.”

What made her choose this image?

“The sky! It looked really good. The lamp was lit because it was just starting to get dark”

And what did she do?

“We've got a photocopier in the studio which is fantastic, so I blew up the photograph to the size I wanted, and then I planned it out. I've got loads of layers of paper, with all the different drawings, all taped up together to work out where everything is going to go.”

“I'll have the photograph sitting there, and then I'll have the photocopy making it big, and then this is photocopied on to tracing paper, the bits that I need, the photographic elements, and then I cut the sky out, with a little hole in that lamp shape, because I printed the sky first and then I printed the yellow next. I wanted the yellow to be really bright, because that's what it was.  And then this building was one big paper shape aswell, and again I've cut out one little hole, a little stencil for the other light, so that I could print those bits yellow, and then I printed all of that because I wanted to make sure it was going to look as good as I thought it would and it did, so I thought, right, it was worth going on, and I spent ages doing the foreground. It's got lots of layers, it's a lot more intricate.”

I wonder if Claire regards herself as a photographer-printer.

“I love documenting things. My friends get annoyed with me, because I'm always the one with the camera documenting everything. I think I'm quite a good photographer. I take quite good pictures. Make people look good.”

We move on to the collagraphs, starting with “Baddi”

Baddi

“I have so much fun doing collagraphs.  Other people in here who do collagraph tend to do them on old etching plates, so they're metal plates. I wouldn't like to do that. I like cardboard, because I can cut them out into any shape I want. We've got a laser cutter, so I can cut bits out on the laser, that's how I did those little holes in "Baddi". I just set up a little 5cm circle and I plonked them into place where I wanted them… and filled them up with Polyfilla.”

“I love Polyfilla and glue. I love textures. The collagraph plates are almost like little sculptures really, because I've slapped on that much Polyfilla and I've used all different kinds of tools, so we've got wee palette knives, bits of cardboard, etching needles, things like that to carve back into them. It's just really good fun. And quite like my plant monoprints, very unpredictable. You don't know how they're going to turn out. So sometimes I'll carve into them, take a print and think there's not enough detail in it, so I've got to carve into it a bit more, and maybe add a bit more glue. If you add the glue and the varnish you get the crackle effect which I love. Firstly, I applied a layer of glue and let that dry and then varnish over the top. It reacts. It crackles. And the crackling is unpredictable as well.”

“There's a really good crackle effect in “Baddi”. Luckily it worked out. You can almost see the brush stokes…where the brush has gone. Yes. And then I cut out some really thin plastic, again I cut out the shapes, inked them up and then sat them on top of the plate to take the print. So there's all sorts of things you can do.”

And that's the same for “Bab Doukkala” as well.

Bab Doukkala

“Perhaps it's a 50's style, like a 50's animation, these shapes... they're chimneys. All different kinds of chimneys. This is an archway and a step. This is the wall of the Medina in Marrakech, in the Bab Doukkala area. You can go through the archway to get into it.”

“Medina of Essaouira” is in the same vein.

Medina Of Essaouira

“They're all from photographs. This is beside the bus station in Essaouira. That's a screen printed donkey. I wasn't sure how to deal with that. Whether to make it part of the collagraph by using the grit. You put glue and you sprinkle carborundum grit which is used to grind and clean off images on lithostones, You can use them to get collagraph plates aswell, so that's where all these textures come from. But I decided to screenprint that little donkey, who was actually there in the image, against this nice pink building, very old building...The colours are true to the subject.”

“But for these, what I love about them is that you ink them up in intaglio style, like an etching plate. You push ink in to the lines that you've created and all the gritty textured areas, and then you wipe that off the surface, but then what I've been doing is to roll another colour over the top of the plate, relief style, rolling over and then place damp paper on top and put it through the press. I think it's really creative and it's such a mixture of techniques. Making the plate itself is very sculptural, and it's also combining old, traditional methods with modern technologies, like using the laser cutter to cut some of the shapes.”

Finally, we look at “Eels, Essaouira”

Eels, Essaouira

“ This is an electro-etching. The image comes from a photograph. In Essaouira. They have this huge fishing port, huge fishmarket,  and I loved it down there; I took loads of amazing photographs. We always seemed to end up there in the afternoons so it's very dramatic light and great big long shadows. Lots going on, lots to see. There was a table with these poor eels. This is exactly how they looked. They had silvery skins, but they were all scratched….they’re very fragile and they’d just been roughly handled. Lying there, I felt so sorry for them, but I was really interested in their teeth. We don't see things like that here. We don't have fish markets. It's all dealt with in Tescos. It's interesting to see. I don't like it. I'm vegetarian. It's all a bit sad for me.”

Why did you treat the image in this way?

“I tried doing this as a collagraph. I tried to make a collagraph of the eels, but it didn't work. We were just introducing electro-etching. We're learning. We're doing training in electro-etching, which isn't too different to normal etching, except there's an electrical current that goes through the copper sulphate that you put the plate in. So I was interested and wanted to do that. I already knew that I wanted to use silver leaf. I love gold and silver in prints. You look at the face of it and it looks good, but then the light catches it, it lights up. I also teach etching classes, and it's a good example of what I'm trying to explain about chine-colle' which is a gummed up paper. Did I explain about that? Chine-colle is French for gummed up paper. It's like archival wallpaper paste, really expensive wallpaper paste. It won't go mouldy or discolour. You paint that on to a sheet of acrylic, then you put your paper on, usually thin paper, quite fragile, maybe Japanese paper. I think that's how it was originally used; you put it on to the acrylic and let it dry. When it dries, you just peel it off. It's like a postage stamp, so you can lick it and stick it. When you're printing, because we always soak the paper first and then blot it, it's still damp, and when you put it through the press the dampness from the paper is enough to stick these little chine-colle eyes on to the print. You do it all in a one-r.”

“First of all, what I did was I screenprinted the silver shapes on to the paper and then I put the silver leaf on. It was quite difficult to register, you can see that in one of them the registration is not so good. I inked up the etching plate as usual, scraped the black ink across the plate, forcing it into the lines, then wiped it back off the surface. Then I masked off little areas for this strip and rolled dark blue ink up there. I didn't want it over the silver of the eels, so I must have put a tracing paper mask (over it). There's a lot of work in this. Rolled that over, and then had to register the plate exactly with the silver shapes, which was quite difficult. I had a registration board. I had it all worked out.  And placed the eyes on the etching plate. Then I put the plates down with the eyes on the plate, placed the paper on top and ran it through the press. There are only six of them, because it was really difficult to do.”

“There's a lot to it, and people don't appreciate how much effort goes into all of them. This person I know keeps saying my posters are really nice. (Laughs). They're not posters. They're individually handmade works of art. Very affordable, but you know….”

So there we are: The Moroccan pictures. And this is only half of them. How do they sit in Claire’s artistic output?

“Hmm. I love them. I'm proud of them. Definitely. I really like them, but they probably mean an awful lot more to me because I was there and I experienced all this. I've tried to bring it back and put it down on paper to show how lovely it is, and some of the interesting things that I saw, but technically I think they're pretty good. None of these prints were easy. They were all a lot of work. Even the guy on the horse on the beach. I had to do that about three times.

“When I look at other people's artwork and when I look at my artwork, I always think ‘Would I put that on my wall?’ I love these. The collagraphs, they're on my wall all of the time; they're always there; and I've got most of those other ones up as well. I love them. I enjoy looking at them. I haven't got tired of them. If money was no object. I'd be straight back to Morocco and stay for a month. And then come back with a whole load of new material, and continue doing stuff like this.”

Roger Spence