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Printed on Arches paper by Douglas Corker at Kelpra Studio and published by Waddington Graphics. Inscribed by the artist ‘Stephen Buckley 1981’ b.r. and numbered. Unframed. The title of this print is not translatable into English as it means the sound and atmosphere of a fair or carnival; the artist told the compiler it was ‘maybe a bit like the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd’ (this and other quotations from correspondence, March 1985). The print was made concurrently with a painting of the same title which was completed in January 1982. These were followed by a further four ‘Flons Flons’ paintings, the last of which was made in August 1982. All the ‘Flons Flons’ works are also related to the monoprints Buckley made at Alan Cox’s workshop Sky in the Spring of 1982.
This print is one of three made at the same time at Kelpra, the others being ‘Album’ and ‘Akenside’ (the latter has sometimes been known as ‘Jesmond’).‘Flons Flons’ was the first to be made; it is built up with drawings made actual size on tracing cloth using a water soluble opaque ink. There were seven screens/colours’. The orange mesh to the left was done ‘from masking tape on tracing cloth exposed directly onto (the) screen’. The background was made up from two photographic separations from Buckley’s original full size drawing and the leaf shapes and striped discs were done from two and three photographic separations respectively. The colours were finalised through ‘instinct and trial and error plus an idea in my head that I wanted print colours rather than paint colours’.
