My name is John Bonath and you are standing in front of my 8-color silkscreen print entitled “Synapse Tapestry”.
“Synapse Tapestry” is an exploration of the color red and its effect on the human psyche. The special red used in this print has an unusually high pigment content causing intense perceptual retina stimulation. The rich, yet matte, quality of the silkscreen ink gives it a seductive velvet quality that also beckons the sense of touch and is what makes the silkscreen process so special.
Identifying the subject in the image as “yarn” is but an initial place to grab onto and then jump off from. The image evokes a gestalt associations with many things. My imagination takes me to a place inside the body, or underwater, where synapse-like
energy is transmitted inside the organism. It is a visual journey into my own psyche that touches on the nature of physical mortality; a place that others are invited to journey into with their own imagination.
Technically this print “pushes” the silkscreen process in several ways.
My goal was to create a silkscreen image that had a photographic illusion of space. The silkscreen process is inherently a two-dimensional graphic media and I was attempting to push silkscreen to a level of three-dimensionality with digital technology that is difficult to do.
I have accumulated much photo-silkscreen experience over the years with taking photographic images apart in many ways and reconstructing them in silkscreen. For me, it is a process of previsualization final color choices in my head and technically understanding how to get there. In so doing, I have found that a color strategy is most successful when it does not look finished until the last color is applied and at that exciting moment, the entire image pulls together like magic. There is always a mental process of technical strategy planning, along with an understanding of how specific inks overlay and how screen patterns will print through the screen mesh. You can never really see the final result until you get there. Seeing something like this on a monitor is more misleading than helpful.
The biggest challenge of this print was in the exploration of various organic and mechanical dot patterns unique to digital technology. In order to “milk” the value range of each ink, to get the most 3-D illusion possible, I did not use traditional high-contrast halftone-dot patterns, but instead chose unusual versions of this image from both CMYK and RGB separations from which I combined “dithered” organic dot patterns with “indexed color” patterns to create high contrast plates to print from - a process that stretched my intellectual capabilities to its limits and at times, caused steam to escape out my ears.
When you stand back from the print, it is very 3 dimensional. But look at it up close and see the way in which it is constructed and you can see how graphically 2-dimensional the process really is.