Techniques

The Vortiists used a variety of artistic techniques to get their message across. They didn't just rely on the power of their pictorial work.  This page looks at the technical processes involved behind each of the main techniques.

Oils

Oil Painting was a medium used by many of the Vorticists, and a multitude of artists before or since: it is hardly a revolutionary medium.  However, its enduring popularity is due to the resilience and hardwaring capacity of oil paints to last so well.  The backing of a typical oil painting is generally a flax/cotton mixture textile ('canvas') stretched across a wooden frame ('stretchers') then fastened at the edge by tacks.  This affords a taut surface for the artist to then paint on.  Before oils can be used, however, the canvas has to be treated.  Rabbit-skin glue was the traditional treatment.  This was heated then applied, and allowed to dry.  This would act as a layer between the sponge-like canvas and the oil paints. 

Vortography

This is the title given to Vorticist Photography, by its inventor, Alvin Langdon Coburn, an American (like Pound and Lewis) living in London at the time (1914).  A series of glass prisms would be arranged directly in front of (an otherwise orthodox) camera lens which then refracted the light into Vorticist shafts.

Woodcuts

Woodcuts (for printing on paper) is as old as chinese printing, which goes back at least one thousand years.  However, Wadsworth, for one, utilised this traditional art to produce startlingly modernistic scenes of Northern industrialised landscapes, and scenes at Naval dockyards.  The wood was usually Box, carved on the end-grain, and printed using letterpress equipment.  Box as used as it could retain a high level of detail without chipping. Woodcuts are very difficult to achieve without a high degree of patience and skill, let alone artistic ability.

to be continued...