Electric Noir

Circa 1981
Screen print
Diptych, 204 x 76 centimeters

The concept of noir as a crime genre has been over-worked the last decades but when I made this print it was still largely confined to describing American films of the 1940s to the 1960s that had a dark vision of doomed characters dealing with an implacable universe. After watching John Boorman's superb 1967 crime thriller, Point Blank, and its reframing of noir into a landscape of endless car sales lots and featureless office towers, I became keen to explore such themes in this large dyptich.

These large sized panels are at the upper end of what is possible using manual screen printing and I decided to use bold simple geometry, flat areas of colour including a fair amount of unprinted white paper, a restrained colour palette and a stark night-time outdoor/indoor schematic. Ultimately the scale was absurd and hugely impractical but I was still testing the limits of the medium.

Backgound of the screen prints 1977-1981