The first print is of a web made of words using pencil on paper which was scanned into Photoshop and manipulated. This was then silk screened onto. I soaked it in the paper bath and then put it through the press with a hard ground spider on copper. It
still needs something more?
Next is the very tall queen of the Rabbit people, who I made this hard ground copper etching of and then have never used her or featured her, before in a print. So Ithought it was high time she came out of the copper elements drawer.
I printed her on to a mono printed background. Additionally I offset the red house using this kind of spongy stuff which I picked up ages ago in a haberdashery shop. It's a bit like the stuff they make those Spontex cleaning cloths for wiping the kitchen surfaces. I am always losing it around the studio - it's like it has a life of its own and some days it just can't face going through the press. This one is also still under development I need to place some chine colle onto the red house to 'knock it back' because as it stands its too dominant .
Next is the orange print - the first one I think that I have ever done. I think it was meant to be a warm red - but whatever - I quite like it as it is. It has offset organic material and also a tiny bit of silk screened blue text on China paper. Some chine colle, inkjet visual elements, are also included.
Yep it's got all sorts of processes in it. The main background is from an etch
on steel which I did ages ago and wasn't too pleased with. Don't know if we
have the mordant at FDPW for me to work on it further. Mind you the plates
a bit heavy for me, to carry around the workshop but I will ask when I am next
there. I was planning on going in tomorrow but after all the additional
exertions of today with re organizing the studio I can tell already that the
pain in my back is murder so I will see how I feel in the morning. Mind you
I always feel like I have been in a car crash on surfacing
OK it's now Tuesday evening and yeah I did feel pretty rotten this morning but not horrendously so -- just a case of gradually warming up my bones/ motor faculties (something like that). The studio reorganization was continued much of today and I de stapled a few more of the canvases from my MA show. This was held, wait for it (!!) all the way back in 1993, in Winchester School of Art. " !!.......Blast it" those staple removers, or rather the process of doing it, really messes up your fingers/ thumbs...... ugh how I hated doing that but it's good to get rid of stuff and minimize the amount of stuff we have to 'stash' all around the house. Even though there are only the two of us humans living in an allegedly four bedroomed house there's still, no way, enough room for us all !! ( forgot the two kats mind you they only have themselves i.e., no clutter) bless um!!.
I have only kept the ones that I still like - that are, in my mind, up to scratch. C. did remark at one point - I think it was yesterday he said this..."why you could'nt have thrown these out while we still living in London ?? i.e., before we packed all this stuff up to move house up to Scotland etc etc.
But you know what...... I was'nt ready to do that, at the time. You have to be ready to throw stuff out. Whether that be clothes, house clutter or certainly your artwork or even a boyfriend. Have'nt done that for a while - cant say I have enjoyed it when I have. One person decided that they could'nt live without me and phoned to let me know that they were going to do terrible physical damage to themselves but as much as I felt terribly sad for his painful state of mind.....I could'nt make myself have deeper feelings for him than I had. We should have stayed at the friendship level and not moved it up a gear but that had been what he had wanted and I had liked him so very much . He really used to make me laugh so much, he had such a lively mind and and he was an artist as well. I guess he was crazy about me. In more ways than one.
Anyway I digress but I have often wondered how he is and how his life has turned out.
Next print is an inkjet with collagraph of little rabbit fetus images on it. I need to do some more collagraph impressions onto it, of those, that have stronger lines in particular. I have thrown some of those that are too feint away and will remake some using modelling paste spatula' ed onto some mount card and then inscribed into. I did one like that using text onto modelling paste and it worked out really well.
Last but not at all least is the etching (well it was in the beginning !) knight bird with found baby. The etch seemed to wear off and so to keep it proofing satisfactorily I had to drypoint most of the marks. I am wondering now if I put it in the saline etch. Yeah course I did - I did it here. It's on an aluminium plate.
The reason it's posted here again on the blog (I made it as part of the previous batch of prints) is because the chine colle (lime green coloured) had 'bubbles' in it. Horror of horrors - I was most annoyed with my 'cak-handedness'. what a wally. That's because of rushing or it may have been that I was tired and not paying attention.
One thing I have done since then is to squirt all the rice paste which I purchased from Intaglio Printmakers London, into a glass jar. This really was as a consequence of this print 'buggering up'. In it's original container it was coming out of the yellow plastic tube like a big fat tube length of toothpaste. Some how I was'nt spreading it correctly onto the paper to be chine-colled and that's how come the print was insufficiently pasted, first time round. So now I use a brush and sometimes also will use the side of an old credit card if it's a large area to be applied to the paper. What I did with this particular print, was to slit open the bubble areas with a scalpel (I kind of felt like a surgeon too doing that) and poke the small paste brush in, with great care. That was 'air' in those bubbles !!. Now it looks a lot better and I just need to touch it up slightly further with a tiny bit more of the lime green paper and rub it with the back of a spoon. Very high tech I am very !!
Hi Aine, great prints. I particularly like "the orange one". I'm continually amazed by how much you achieve despite obstacles and doing big things like reorganising your studio - makes me feel tired just thinking about it. You made me laugh about the bubbles: I too have been there piercing the damned things and trying to flatten them out with a little extra paste... now I paste the paper, let it dry a bit and then paste it again before applying, and I use a bone folder to smooth it onto the underlying print if I can. Sara x
ReplyDelete