A contemporary canvas for Siris Hill’s printed paintings

“My work was being defined by the process rather than the stories I was telling.”

As an artist, there are few things more frustrating and Siris Hill knows this well – his canvas is a graphics tablet and his brushes an assortment of digital tools. So, challenging misconceptions around the creation of his art and removing the ‘digital barrier’ became all-consuming. Then, one day, he saw Clemens Weijkamp, elevated printing technologist at Canon Production Printing on YouTube talking about the artist who changed his life.

“When I discovered Rembrandt, I was sleeping rough,” he remembers. “And saw this painting on my phone – a man sat in the corner of a room and a beam of light shining. He looked homeless, like me. Rembrandt decided this man’s story was worth telling and, within that, I felt seen. I knew instantly I would become a painter, to tell stories like that.”

From this moment, Siris began not to view his habit of drawing as “a survival tool”, but a means to change his life. “I had this idea that I was going to go to university and study fine art,” he laughs. With no qualifications, no home and battling physical and mental illness every day, to anyone else this might seem impossible, but not Siris. He found an access course and took his small portfolio to the course leader. Who immediately turned him down. “I looked at her and said, ‘I promise I will be your hardest working student and I will get an unconditional university offer.” She was convinced and, as promised, he did just that, gaining at place to study Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts.

Today, his education and experience seem no different to that of any other painter. But his creative direction? Well, the journey makes that decision for an artist. As a result of prolonged homelessness and a childhood spent in and out of hospital being treated for Crohn’s Disease, Siris suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He discovered that the fumes from chemicals used in traditional oil painting – the medium of choice of his beloved Rembrandt – would trigger huge panic attacks.

But, as many will testify, nothing else performs quite like oil, especially for portraits. “When I discovered digital painting, I made life really hard for myself by applying the rules of oil painting in digital form,” he says. What this means is that there is an order in which oil painters need to apply their paint. “I forced myself to use only one layer and dismissed many the new software tools available to me as possible.” And while Siris had no need of these rules, he used them anyway, “just to be like a purist – probably responding to the pressure of wanting my work to be considered good.

And that pressure was very real. “I was working 16-hour days almost every day,” he recalls. “Then I would print my work onto archival paper or canvas and all I would get is, ‘Oh, it’s digital. So, the computer did it for you?’. Always questions about the method rather than the story. So frustrating.” This led him to seek ways to take his work into the three-dimensional space and give it the impact of paint on canvas. Because, for Siris, this is more than personal. His paintings, presented under the title of Ordinary, are not just shining a light on some of the most marginalised people in society, but also represent the mountain he too has climbed to become the artist he was determined to be.

So, he experimented with digital displays, textured screen printing, printing on acrylic and building lightboxes to illuminate his work. “I would really think about the temperature of each bulb, so the work was lit correctly,” he explains. “And seeing them in a dark room was amazing but, again, people were enjoying the technology and the gimmick. What I really wanted was my work to be considered in the same way as a painting in a gallery.” Once again, Rembrandt came to the rescue. 

“I found a video on a project that Canon was part of, where Clemens talks about how a painting's not real unless it has texture and depth,” recalls Siris. “And they’d scanned a Rembrandt to get the height data, built their digital image, then elevated printed his painting. And I was like, ‘Wow! That’s what I need to do!’” Siris then made it his mission to find someone who could introduce him to Clemens and Canon Production Printing. 

And when that meeting took place, it resulted in years of creative experimentation, with Clemens’s expertise in elevated print meeting the exacting needs of an artist with a passionate vision. The results have been a huge success. Siris and a colleague have been developing software which transforms his 2D paintings into 3D, creating a file that can be “sculpted into”, like a palette knife in impasto oil, before using our PRISMAelevate XL software to ready it for print on the Canon Arizona.

In doing so, he has tapped into so much of human nature. He understands that art must be met, not simply observed, and to do that requires a connection. And he uses the tactility of his art to create that that connection and give voice to people who usually do not have a safe space in which to share their worlds. Some elevated prints from Ordinary have even been presented in in the Roden Learning Centre at The National Gallery in London, where Siris was invited to give a talk about his approach in the Rembrandt room, celebrating the artist’s 420th birthday. Surrounded by hundreds of the world’s most prestigious and culturally significant oil paintings, bringing new print technology into this most respected of institutions is about as validating as it gets for an artist who is looking to be taken seriously for their skills as a painter, not just a digital painter.

Learn more about the creative potential of our Arizona printers and PRISMAelevate XL software.