Stephen Andrews (artist) to his own experience of living with HIV. Andrews’ method of homemade colour separation evokes both the 19th-century painting technique of Pointillism: “in which small, distinct dots of pure color are applied in patterns to form an image”, and the Ben-Day dots of mechanical printing. Beyond these references, Andrews’ uses the technique to, at the same time, evoke the alchemy of vision and break its mechanics down. As a result, Andrews creates works that “hover at legibility.” “The pixilation or dot matrix completely obscures details, making specifics impossible to see. We can't grasp the full picture.“ The series of rubbed-crayon
Ben-Day dots Ben-Day dots The Ben-Day dots printing process, named after illustrator and printer Benjamin Henry Day, Jr., (son of 19th Century publisher Benjamin Henry Day) is a technique dating from 1879. Depending on the effect, colour and optical illusion needed, small colored dots are closely spaced, widely spaced or overlapping. Magenta dots, for example, are widely spaced to create pink. Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s used Ben-Day dots in the four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) to inexpensively create shading and secondary colors such as green, purple, orange, and flesh tones on the cheap paper on which