Craig Keenan
I’m printmaker specializing in cyanotypes. While I teach screenprinting and produce work for people via that medium – I always fall back on cyanotypes as being my primary creative output. My favourite thing in the world is listening to good music and just being creative in some form or another. It’s peaceful, meditative and a deep compulsion.
I absolutely love the depth and richness of colour that the cyanotype process produces, as well as the gestural brush strokes and mark making. The fact that they sit somewhere between painting, photography and printmaking is why I love the process.
I enjoy constraints within creativity – a blank canvas and infinite possibility can be a daunting prospect, so being tied to say, a specific colour, is actually quite freeing.
I spend a lot of time painting abstract pieces – it’s basically meditation through mark making, but it’s nothing I’d be proud enough to put into the public eye – but this definitely informs the work I produce. I actually make lots of different things, from abstract painting to collage to screenprints to illustrations and typographic work. But I always find solace in cyanotyping – it hits all the right notes for me creatively – it’s digital and analogue, painterly and expressive. It’s also slightly unpredictable.
