Words on the Street - Red

While out on one of my morning photo walks, a series black and white tiles caught my attention. It was a section of a shop's facade. Four-inch square tiles with apparently random designs and placement, as if a previous shop owner found a box of remnant tiles at a Re-store, or in a dumpster; as if the shop's staff had been tasked to decorate blank tiles with black sharpie markers. 

Or... is it not random? Could it all mean something? The tile shapes, placement, occasional repetition, remind me of ancient written languages, hieroglyphics, cuneiform, runes. Alien code from a B sci-fi movie, a message from outer space. The real date of the end of time. Thus this work's title, which is also a play on the slang expression, as in "word on the street" is that MCO Fine Art is the real deal.

The original section of tiles is black and white. To convert to color, I started working with this in a mode called "Duotone" in Photoshop. Duotone mode actually starts with a grayscale image for luminosity, and the artist can then choose ink colors, from a Pantone pallet, for example. While I liked the woodcut look with two colors of ink (red and very light gray noise for the whites), test prints looked a little flat for my taste. So, in the end, in the final print, the red is actually comprised of tiny dots of different shades of red, creating slightly more complex, rich red.

Details

• Paper Size: 17 x 25 inches
• Image Size: 12.6 x 22 inches
• Margins: about 1.5 inches
• Paper: 100% cotton rag paper. Archival grade. Matte.
• Available in different colors. Edition of 5 prints each color.
• Camera: Fujifilm X-E3
• Date: 2020