Peter Bainbridge: turning legends into icons
Image: High Voltage Rock'n'Roll with Angus Young. Image: Peter Bainbridge
One of the few delights about Facebook is for those who have Peter Bainbridge in their contacts list.
On most days the former fashion photographer uploads an original image of a rock star or a personality in popular culture and averaging around 60 likes per post.
“I’ve been doing prints for about nine years now and have been posting to Facebook almost every day for the past six or seven years,” Peter Bainbridge, screen printer and illustrator said.
“In that time I have done somewhere between two and three thousand images.”
What is unique, apart from their striking simplicity, use of colour and fine lines, is the fact that if you like something enough to want to buy it, Bainbridge will strike a silk screen print of the subject.
If the images are impressive, the silk screen print is even more so as Bainbridge is a master craftsman who has spent years perfecting not only the line detail of the print, but also the way it looks with solid colours that pop above the surface of the paper in a nine-step process that can take eight weeks from order to delivery.
“First it’s illustrated, and then I mix the colours and screen test those, and that takes a week,” Bainbridge said.
Then the A1 file goes to London where the separations are made.
“That comes back and is transferred photographically to huge sheets of film up to 1.5 metres, and this might be for up to 10 sheets costing around $700,” Bainbridge said.
“Then they go onto photo sensitive coated screens and I start doing test prints and tweak the colours, which can take two weeks.
“Then the printing takes two weeks.”
The final printing happens in a closed environment that is temperature controlled with an industrial humidifier.
“Each pull, you have to wait two hours before it partially dries and then you do the next colour,” Bainbridge said.
“The technique that I use no-one else does and I use open screens and that means lots of ink on the paper and it makes it look more painterly.”
As to the fine lines that he achieves in his work Bainbridge said “you have to draw so many before you realise how they should look next to each other.”
With no commercial imperative to choosing his subjects Bainbridge said that he works on the basis that he firstly must like the music before he goes looking for an image.
“I did a great image of Nick Cave the other day where I searched for the simplest image I could find, not the sharpest and not the most detailed, because then it becomes too real,” Bainbridge said.
“You have to make it look like them, it has to be really simple and it has to have an artistic bent to it.”
People that he has illustrated the most would include Cave, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger Debby Harry and David Bowie.
“I’ve also done Australian artists such as Chris Bailey from the Saints, Rob Younger from Radio Birdman, Angus Young and Skyhooks,” Bainbridge said.
“Every time I do this it will look completely different.”
By now, Bainbridge is used to getting feedback from his subjects who will often message his personal site.
“Shirley Manson from Garbage sent me a note saying she adored my drawing of her, and so did Debby Harry and Nick Cave.
I can’t imagine Nick Cave being impressed with much but he didn’t just hit the like button, he hit the love button.”
Bainbridge is also getting commissions from Harper’s Bazaar and has contributed to their current special edition Ageless Influencers which features Cher, Donatella Versace, Kate Bush and local author Clair Madden as being older women who are still contributing to society.
“The drawings are getting better and more varied and people seem to be warming to them,” Bainbridge said.
