With the help of artist and printmaker Emma Stibbon (The Arctic Ocean) and Jim Reid, Master Printer, Gemini Gel L.A (The Pacific Ocean) Ian Brown has made a modern version of the Seven Seas - the seven largest bodies of water on the planet, as opposed to the seven seas centred around the Mediterranean of the ancient world. As he describes it, “The result is an idyllic vision of our Oceans as we focused only on the waters’ surface. Looking below and on the beaches a more sinister picture emerges. It has radically changed my thinking and the focus of the prints I am working on now is on lost species combined with images of environmental change - icebergs and glaciers at the moment.

He chose to involve two other artists (Stibbon and Reid) partly because he liked the idea of working with another artist’s aesthetic but also for practical reasons – Stibbon had worked in the Arctic and supplied images for him to work from. Even though he had set some parameters - a focus on the water surface, a horizon, some sky and nothing else (no flotsam, jetsam, boats or birds), her image selection was interestingly different from his own. He asked Jim Reid to supply images of the Pacific as he had no opportunity to go back to California in the period he was making these prints.

As he said “Working with two other artists developed and shaped this project. It gently prised open my thinking and made me embrace the unexpected. This proved invaluable when my preconceived ideas of what I might encounter were dashed on arriving at a location and I was under pressure to make something work under time and weather constraints.”

The prints are tone separated colour separations, using mostly around 20 colours. Brown chose this laborious method because he wanted to use a technique that enhanced the liquidity of the subject matter. Normally, to print full colour you would use a conventional 4-colour half-tone process and in screen-printing the dots always show. Tone separating each of the four channels in Photoshop, allowed a dot-free outcome. In some of the prints (the Indian Ocean for example) and with the use of transparent layers of colour, this softened the image so that it lost the traditional screenprint signature. The result more closely resembled watercolour. After years of working with the visual language of dots and pixels this was described by Brown as “refreshingly new territory”.