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Painters and printmakers

Prints made by painters seem to have a distinctive quality to them. It seems to me this is a matter of perspective. Painters seem to be focused first on the effect they want, rather than thinking about any specific print technique.

Emily Mason

My first example is new to me. Emily Mason (1927-2019) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. I first came across her work in a video on YouTube by Albert van der Zwart, in his Channel ‘Imperfect paintings‘ (well worth following) Having watched it, though, the memory slipped away until I rewatched Albert’s video, after which I did some more online research. This was when I discovered she was also a printmaker.

From there I was led to a short documentary about her, on Vimeo, showing her at work and talking about what she was trying to achieve. Although talking about her paintings I still found it illuminating. I always find I get more from watching an artist making their own work than telling me how to do mine, however well-intentioned.

Richard Diebenkorn

You can see a good example of the interplay between painter and printmakers at work in this video of Richard Diebenkorn at work in the studios of Crown Point Press in 1986. I very much like his work and really regret missing the major exhibition in London because of illness. His paintings, especially those he made in New Mexico, seem to have strong affinities with those of Mason, although I don’t know if they ever met.

The sound quality isn’t brilliant, but you can see at the beginning he knows broadly what he wants and is trying to duplicate the improvisational quality of his paintings in prints and is more or less reliant on the printmakers to tell him how to get a given effect.

Howard Hodgkin

Howard Hodgkin’s work as a printmaker was instrumental in getting me into printmaking. I visited a printmaking workshop where work was in progress on one of his prints. I touch on this on the About page. From what I understand, his relationship with the printmakers was much more hands-off than Diebenkorn’s. His work is characterised by strong, bold colours.

Gillian Ayres

I saw this print, along with several others, at the Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork Street in London. They, like Hodgkin, were characterised by strong colours, but with more organic shapes. The retrospective exhibition of her work at Cardiff Museum and Art Gallery was stunning.

Albert Irvin

Albert Irvin was the subject of an exhibition of his work at the Royal West of England Academy in 2019. I’ve adapted the approach to screen printing shown in this video to the making of my own gel monotype prints.

Martyn Brewster

I haven’t managed to see Martyn Brewster’s work in the flesh yet. His work was recommended to me by a gallery owner I was talking too. I’ve now got a couple of catalogues from former shows and looked at a lot of work online. I certainly want to see the real thing.

For all these artists, their work making prints complements their painting. Each practice supports the other.

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Wiltshire Print Creatives

Last year I joined with a group of other artist printmakers who share the same workshop space to form Wiltshire Print Creatives, an informal collective. We had our first group show in November at 44AD Artspace in Bath. We were very pleased with the reception we got and sold quite well, so we are now firming things up to create a more coherent presence with a website and social media. You can already find us on Twitter and get an informal peak behind the scenes but we intend to ramp this up over the next few months and probably add other social media platforms like Instagram.

We also have a couple of further shows lined up – more later – but are still looking for new opportunities and venues, especially where we might be able to establish a more permanent presence.

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Some Mixed Media and Collage pieces

Avebury Neolithic circle

Because I couldn’t stand at the press for quite a while (see the previous post for why), I also made some small collage pieces. These have no particular theme, they are just playing with the medium.

All are available in my Etsy shop here (£25.00 each, matted to fit a 10″ x 8″ frame – see the listing for full details):
https://preview.tinyurl.com/y7dt9j9y

This link to an Etsy search on ‘mixed media collage’ also brings up some other items including a number from my ‘Made to Music’ series (£15 for unmatted, £30 matted – see the listing for full details – and making me realise that I’ve worked this way on several occasions.

I have another series called ‘Around Avebury’, which has yet to be added to the Etsy shop. These are all in handmade oak frames. You can find these on my Portfolio Pages.

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A new print series

I’ve been unable to do any printing for quite a while. I have been plagued with problems with my foot, putting me on crutches since mid-November. I used my down time looking at a lot of pictures, but also thinking about subjects and themes. I’ve been interested in neolithic rock art for some time now and living near Avebury and Stonehenge it’s impossible to avoid standing stones. Scattered also across the landscape of Wessex are hundreds, if not thousands of barrows and burial mounds and of course the White Horses like Pewsey, Cherhill, Westbury etc in Wiltshire or Uffington in Oxfordshire. In addition we have the famous Cerne Abbas Giant, the Long Man of Wilmington and assorted other hill figures, many now lost completely.

It isn’t just Britain with these features. The stone alignments of Carnac in Brittany are well known, but there are a multitude of standing stone circles, alignments and dolmens across France and Ireland and much further afield.

Putting all this together made me wonder about the sort of landscape we might see if more had survived. Out of that has evolved the print series I’m putting together. This will take landscapes, more or less stylised and incorporate into them other figures. I will draw on a range of sources. I’m researching Celtic and Saxon myths, cave paintings as well as the sort of abstract shapes found in rock art.

Technically, these prints will incorporate collagraph and dry point plus perhaps solar etching and ultimately hand embellishments. I also expect to use monoprinting or hand painting as the ground on which the prints will be made. I’m also going to try and incorporate some of the techniques used by Australian artist, Kim Westcott. (http://www.kimwestcott.com, although the site did not load properly for me.) She reuses old plates in combination with new, mixing in shadow prints and rotation of the plates to create her drypoints.

I have no prints as yet, but here are some rough sketches and photos of some plates in preparation.

With luck, I’ll have more over the next few weeks.

***

I’m not the only one finding inspiration in these themes. See the web pages for Irish artist Tommy Barr.

http://tbarrart.homestead.com/index.html

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Group Show

A bit late in the day for a promo, but I’m taking part in a group show at 44AD Gallery in Bath as a part of Wiltshire Print Creatives. We are an informal collective of printmakers, united only by the use of the same workshop space at Wiltshire College in Trowbridge.

We hung the show on Monday morning. Coming back for the evening Preview and seeing the show as a whole for the first time it was obvious that sharing the same workspace has allowed for some sort of artistic osmosis. Everywhere I looked I could see commonalities in vision and expression across all the work. I was very proud to see what we had achieved. Despite the fact that this is the work of friends I can genuinely say that the work on show is to a high standard both technically and creatively and well worth a visit if you can. My thanks to the other 11 for their support over the years and for their work in putting this together and making it happen.

The Wiltshire Print Creatives are…

  • Tonia Gunstone
  • Caroline Morriss
  • Kerrie McNeil
  • Martin Covington
  • Bella Bee
  • Judy Brett
  • Ian Bertram
  • Hayley Cove
  • Flora Jayne Camacho
  • Alex Nash
  • Claire Camacho
  • Jane Temperley
Setting up
Final Hang
Private View