Daddy likes the Lawn Neat and Trim, Brian Sailer

In this print Brian Sailer portrays the subject of a father mowing his suburban home’s lawn while his children play nearby. This standard scene becomes unsettlingly as Sailer depicts the man forcefully pushing the lawnmower precariously close to the children in front of him. The way in which Sailer employs a screen printed sugar-lift technique creates a blurred and fog-like atmosphere, which heightens disturbing qualities of an otherwise mundane domestic scene.

KU Visual Art professor, Michael Kreuger, described the unusual technique used to create this work in a recent interview:
“This is a four-color etching, and it is done on steel, which is not that unusual but it has some characteristics that are different from copper that we were utilizing. This is kind of a nice example of how we were trying to figure out ways to get digital technology to merge with traditional processes. We were able to use Photoshop, at the time it was Photoshop 2.0 or something, but we could scan in photographs, we could make a collage. And that’s what we did. And then we could print out the color separations as separate files. And then we took those color separations and exposed them onto a photo silkscreen. And then we came up with this crazy idea. My friend Craig Dongoski and I came up with this [sugar-lift] technique where we were silkscreening condensed milk onto the etching plates. And then the condensed milk would dry and we painted on that with the straw hat [a type of varnish] or some other ground to lift through, and then we would lift out the condensed milk and we would have a photo image on a plate.”