SOPHIE SMALLHORN
Colour Wheel 5, 2014
84(w) x 84(h) cm
14 Colour screenprint on Somerset 410gsm paper with hand torn edge.
Edition of 45
PRICE (INCL. VAT)
£900.00
Colour Wheel 5 is Eyestorm’s first limited edition screenprint with Sophie Smallhorn. Best known as the artist behind the changing colour spectrum that ran around the 2012 Olympic stadium, Sophie has an obsession with colour. Angie talks more about the new edition below.
It was at Jealous print studio in Shoreditch that I first saw Sophie Smallhorn’s work. She had made editions there in the past, and Matthew thought I’d like them, so showed them to me and suggested I spoke to her. He was right and I was immediately drawn to them. Sophie has this amazing ability to use colour in a way I’ve never seen before. If you tried to visualise the vibrant reds, yellows and florescent pinks she places next to pastel hues and tones of wine, midnight blue and brown in your mind, it would seem like it could never work. But somehow Sophie manages to make her creations look like the best colour decisions you have ever seen, and they probably are.
There’s no real theory or science behind Sophie’s approach. Everything is done visually, and the block forms she presents are just as important as her colour choices in making each piece make visual sense. In works such as the set of four screenprints ‘Yellow’, ‘Pale’, ‘Navy’ and ‘Wine’, blocks of flat colour, sometimes overlapping to create new tones of those that have merged, sit satisfyingly flat on the paper, giving the appearance of building blocks and a rewarding sense of stability.
When I first approached Sophie about making a limited edition with Eyestorm however, it was her circular colour wheel pieces that were on my mind. An ongoing body of work - Colour Wheel 1 and 2 were made in 2001, and 3 and 4 nine years later, all of which have now sold in their entirety - these prints are pure, clean and confident; a continuous flow of carefully selected small blocks of colour, each placed in the perfect position to please the eye.
And so came Colour Wheel 5, the fifth print in the series and Eyestorm’s first edition with Sophie. A true professional, Sophie mixed each of the colours in her own studio previous to our meeting, and arrived with her mock up collage and colour swabs all ready for printing. Only one colour remained to be mixed which was the bright fuchsia pink in the top right of the circle, and it wasn’t until I experienced her blending and stirring various different shades of ink for almost an hour, that I realised her true obsession with colour. Also an installation artist, it’s not surprising with her eye and experience that Sophie is the artist behind the colour changing spectrum that ran around the outside of the 2012 London Olympic Stadium while the world was watching.
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