This print is a looser, much less controlled variant in the life energy series, with the yin-yang symbol added on to indicate balance. Or actually, in this case, imbalance and negative life energy.
In this print, the first stage was to paint the life energy characters and the yin-yang symbol directly onto the screen using a thick, olive-green watercolour layer followed by acrylic medium to activate the colour on the paper. It was surprisingly difficult to get the neat colour to register on the paper, so much so that the Chinese characters are barely recognisable in the final print. Rather than printing out dark olive green as expected the characters were left white with a pronounced edge. Not what was expected, but rather more interesting and exciting: a useful result.
The next (final) stage was to turn the print up-side down and overprint the negative (white) yin-yang with a photo-stencilled screen in a brown ink made from the yellow watercolour sketch shown above on the right. The purpose of turning it upside down was to try and capture the chaotic nature of life. This was an experimental piece with a successful result: fortunately, chaos is always seems easier to achieve than order and reason.
