Film 3 - Gilbert & George never show their sketches publicly, but here, the artists offer a private view.

George: See here this is a... it doesn’t look like a sketch but in fact it’s a sketch for taking images of ourselves either of each other or together with a time release.  Do you see it says back fists, hands, fingers open, back fists, hands, fingers open, hands down, so we go all the way through and tick off as we go along. You see we do the same subject normal and then showing teeth, the same subject with a shout, the same with a tongue, the same facing left, going right and then closed eyes.  One could call this a private view because we never exhibit designs or sketches.

Gilbert: And here look right, look left, hands….

George: Arms behind, hands on knees, straight ahead shout, straight ahead tongue, straight ahead teeth, head back, head down.

Gilbert: When we did the SON OF GOD pictures we took maybe three thousand images of little crosses and stuff like that and then we take outside, nature, street, birds or drunks, or us or what do you call, but all in sections, and then when we feel we have enough subjects then we started to do the designs and the designs are always ten per cent of the actual piece.

George: This is a very important sketch for the quadripartite picture called SHITTY NAKED HUMAN WORLD and it is important because we realised that the four sections, the first one has the crucifix, this has a totem like a pagan Stonehenge type thing, this one has something relaxing so we are leaning against the shit its becoming like normal furniture and this one has the shit as a clock face as time rolls by.

Gilbert: And then what they call the designs are made by putting the negative into an enlarger and drawing around it, that’s how we make the third design, not any more we do them on a computer but that’s how we used to make them and that here we have the number on the negative written down and this is exactly written down how much time we gave it on the enlarger, howmany seconds in what we would call faded in and faded out and this is the prototype of the colour that we decided to do it.

George: Where the colours comes.

Gilbert: So, it’s like what you call it’s like a blueprint for the picture, totally, every detail, somebody else could make them for us, but we always made them ourselves.

George: The most interesting thing about the reception of this picture, which is called BUM HOLES is that it was the favourite naked ship picture of females.  This is NAKED PARK.

Gilbert: I mean these are based on... you see the house... the colour, because every panel is coloured in separate. We are all going by numbers, number one is red, number two is two colour, number three has yellow and red, so every… So, we need a what do you call a prototype of… we need a sheet.

George: Because when we are colouring them we are not colouring the whole picture, we are only colouring one section at a time so we have to know exactly where we are.  The colouring of the actual panels is done in a very simple way with a cloth and a bowl of liquid dye, and you have to cover the whole of the sheet all of the time for sometimes one minute or one and a half minutes depending on the tone in colour.

Gilbert: But some parts are being what do you call they are protected with a kind of rubber on the material that we paint on and where the colour doesn’t go into the photo.

George: It’s like a resist. You see this panel we would have to resist the white piece and the flesh piece while we do the red and then we will protect the red with this liquid mask so that we can do the flesh colour.  It’s a sort of liquid gum which can then be removed. We always refer to it as a liquid condom.

Gilbert: But what is exciting is that all the new technology, it feels like it has been designed for us, because what we used to do, the computer does it all, the same system – all the same layers, masking off, fading in, fading out, colour, all the colour layers, the black and white layers, the cutting out layers, the mask and all that – it is exactly like we would have designed it for ourselves. It is just extraordinary.

George: It’s just extraordinary.  It's just darkroom technology and darkroom language updated.