Rob Ryan

‘Like Time, It Waits For Nobody’ Yorkshire Sculpture Park Screenprint

Rob has created a new limited edition screenprint exclusively for Yorkshire Sculpture Park to coincide with Le Tour Yorkshire coming to the county this summer.

This first stage in the ride will start on the 5th of July and will be the first time the Tour de France has started in the North of England, so it is sure to be a special time with cause for celebration! There is a 100 day cultural festival, Yorkshires Grande Départ, starting on 27th March and running until 6th July. This festival will showcase a variety of spectacular events to mark the occasion too.

The three colour screenprint, ‘Like Time, It Waits for Nobody’,  is a limited edition of 100 prints and reads, ‘July 5th 2014. Like time, it waits for nobody. Once the race has started it thunders on doesn’t stop for anyone or anything. But that one summer day in the space that lay between us, somewhere between sky and dale we achieved the imposssible, we made time stop and for one delicious moment we held it in our hands as a gentle breeze caressed our faces and the hot sun made our bodies glow. We breathed time in as deep as we could and held it in inside us for the longest possible moment before we let it loose on its relentless way again. We looked up at the clouds and thought how tiny and insignificant we must look from up there and it didn’t bother us at all’

There were many stages involved in the making of the work. Rob drew out the image and words on to our cutting paper, once he is happy with this we can begin the lengthy process of cutting it out.

Once the papercut is complete we are ready to spray it, using pins to hold the paper in place we spray the piece outside in our studio yard. If you would like to read more about the process of cutting and spraying Robs work you can do so here.

Our printer Tom uses the sprayed papercut to expose on to screen ready to be printed. He can then begin colour sampling the print and experimenting with various colour combinations. Rob decided to produce the work as a three colour screenprint, so we made a stencil to create the block colour backgrounds that split the sky and ground. The third colour is then printed on top this. As you can see from the images there is a lot of time spent experimenting and colour matching before we choose the final print.

Rob comments on the print: ‘I like cycling, I even used to do it for a living years ago when I was a cycle courier riding around London like a madman all day. I like cycling on my own. I like the isolation and the peace it gives me, even in London where it is manic out there on the streets, I find it calms me down. And when in the summer I take my bike out into the Kent countryside and zig zag around the country lanes I find a peace I rarely find else where and that’s what this picture is kind of about. And I love the Tour, it’s the greatest sporting event in the world by miles!!!! Or kilometers!! 3656 of them!!!’

The screen print will be available and on show at Yorkshire Sculpture park from 4th April. YSP will also be showing the papercut alongside this.

Louise Renforth
Studio Assistant