Printed Paintings or painterly prints??

Aaahhhh back from the holidays and rearing to go!! It was a good break but it hardly seemed as if I was away. I walked in this morning and it felt as if I had never left the familiar corridors of MSVA. As usual the week begins with a Contextual studies lecture. It was very different, we had a lecturer talk about their artwork. Today was the lovely Emma McLellan. In the first term I remember standing there as a class, wide eyed, new, scared. We didnt know what to expect. During 2d studio we were introduced breifly to Emma McLellan and her screen printing. I remember Emma McLellan standing there with an apron on showing us her screen print work, I distinctly remember the colour blue stood out most to me and I also remember this winged rat sheep thing. So immedietly this morning when I saw her I remembered her screens that I had seen. Through the lecture I was immediatley drawn to the animals and beasts that McLellan had used as imagery in her screen printing, I am particularly drawn to her 'Chimera Series'. The word Chimera has two meanings the first is that it involves genetics this deals with a type of hybrid animal, typically seen in non-human zooglogy (but also discovered to a rare extent in human beings), a chimera is an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes; if the different cells emerged from the same zygote, it is called a mosaicism. The Chimera is also a mythological creature, its a monstrous fire breathing creature made up of parts of multiple animals, upon the body of a lioness with a tail that terminated in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her spine. Mythology interests me alot, I love the story of Cupid and Psyche, as well as the mythology of the Sirens, myths of stars and Orion and things like that. Chimera also means more generally, 'an impossible or foolish fantasy'. This links to much of McLellan's work, as she deals with a strange mix of bestiary, and animals. In McLellan's early work she was interested in animal imagery and often had animals taking on human attributes. McLellan also had an interest in relationships and how relationships unravel, as well as the human condition. Her interest in human condition lead to her fascination with genetics and mutations, which links to her use of bestiaries as her imagery.

McLellan often borrowed imagery to make her work, in her early work she borrowed motif and ideas from the Elizabethan times. In her later work she took images from books that involved bestaires. She also liked the artist William Morris. We can see an influence of Morris and his ornament pattern making in her work, not only does she borrow some of his imagery and wallpaper patterns but she also likes to work on fabric, which links to pattern and wallpaper, just like Morris used. She started to incorporate her love of bestiaries and her fascination of multiples in wallpaper and created her own unique wallpaper by using animals and pattern, then screen printing them onto an already painted surface. The disintergration of pattern in some of her work links to the pattern of life and how life can be broken down and disrupted. McLellan was trained in screen printing and loves the process, but confesses that she is a very messy screen printer. I think that this makes her screen printing very original, not only does her imagery make it unique, but the fact that McLellan re works her screens. She paints, rubs back, screen prints, prints layers upon layers of screen and paints layers and layers in order to build up layers. If she doesnt like it she cleans it and believes that in doing so it adds to the final result. So what does that make her work??? Printed paintings or painterly prints??