Line drawing of two similar-looking male heads, with one whispering into the other's ear. Printed in black ink. Linked with woodblock number 2008.1113. The simplicity of this woodcut, with white lines against black, influenced the neon light works the artist made in the 1990s. He turned to working with neon light tubes partly as a way of breaking with the very detailed painintings he made in the 1980s. In an interview with Glasgow Print Studio on 21st June 2010, Wiszniewski described how this print had sparked off a series of works using neon light tubes; “About 1989 I’d done a woodcut called ‘Subliminal Thought’ which I actually made into a neon with the figure in the background going on and off very slow, on a timer. So, it was then, quite early on, I started thinking more reductivist in my output because I was getting a reputation for being very rich and being about surface aesthetics...I was interested in reducing things, so I was interested in line, colour and content, letting those three things work together. I liked the idea of having a line and also a line being a title and a line for catching somebody’s attention, like a fishing line, and using colour to give it the right emotional content. The good thing about neon was you worked outwith the rectangle. As soon as you work with a rectangle on canvas you’ve got the concern of surface tension. With neon you’re liberated from that because it’s real stuff existing in a real space.”
