Nooks And Crannies

red c

This morning I carried on with my detour into randomness, overprinting yesterday’s yellow lino cuts with red (Caligo Easy Wipe in Process Magenta mixed 70:30 with Extender).

Because I had a moment of madness and ripped the paper with my bare hands instead of using a nice steel straight edge it was a bit awkward to take the prints with a Japanese baren, especially around the rough edges, so I used a smooth marble egg to get into the nooks and crannies.

red d

I saw marble eggs and spheres being used for hand printing when I did a residency in Pakistan a few years back, where there is a traditional marble carving industry. It works really well for small areas. The eggs are quite expensive so I’ve gotten into the habit of buying them from charity shops and car boot sales.

 

Random Ripping

yellow 3

So, carrying on with my experiment to loosen up and make my approach to art more random and less controlled. I have gone through a process of cutting vinyl blocks randomly, with a selection of tools, then I hacked away at the edges to get rid of the square boundaries. So the next stage is to print them up. I was lucky to have been given some vintage printmaking papers by a friend who was clearing out his late father’s studio. It isn’t watermarked so I don’t know what it is, but it’s a nice off-white, very warm colour and I estimate about 150 gsm or thereabouts.

To keep the randomness going, I gritted my teeth and ripped the paper without measuring it out and using a nice straight edge. It was a horrible experience! It felt like vandalism! I decided to go with a translucent oil-based litho / relief ink (Caligo Safewash), in Process Yellow, mixed 60:40 with Extender.

I inked up the blocks with my best roller and then took the print using a traditional Japanese bamboo baren. The ink was nice and loose because of the amount of Extender I added and the paper thin enough to pick up the ink without needing a heavy press.

yellow 5

And here’s the first print. I’ll be overlaying this with more colours in the next couple of days to push the randomness as far as I can.

The Tyranny Of The Border

borderless

Carrying on with pushing myself out of my comfort zone, I took hold of the squares of vinyl I have been carving at random and started hacking away at the edges. I suppose like so many people I’ve been conditioned to think of two-dimensional art as something sitting neatly within a clearly defined square or rectangular border. I think this is particularly pronounced in printmaking, where metal plates and wood, lino, vinyl blocks come ready cut with nice straight edges. The tyranny of the border. So I took a hefty pair of scissors to them. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, it seemed unnatural to destroy those neat borders and also to do it at random, letting the cuts be guided by the way the scissors pulled against the vinyl, rather than directing the cuts according to some predetermined design, in the spirit of the 20th century Surrealist artists who deliberately tried to generate imagery through accident.

More Cuts

lino 6

I carried on cutting small blocks of vinyl at random, playing around with different tools (Flexcut). I’ve been having a bit of a creative block so I’ve taken a leaf out of The Surrealists book and set an exercise for myself to get a bit more random. The Surrealists had a number of strategies to get their artistic juices flowing.

 

I really messed around with the way I used the cutting tools, getting away from trying to do neat, precise lines and seeing what happens when I twist and turn the tools while I’m moving them across the vinyl. I’m not going to print them just yet, because I’ve thought of another way I can make them even more random …….

How Far Should We Go?

A really interesting blog post questioning how far we should censor art on the ground of the artist’s (alleged or proven) behaviour. via The great and the bad 

Just Cut

lino 1

I’ve hit a creative block and it’s been hard to get the motivation or ideas for new artwork. So today I decided to just grab a handful of printmaker’s vinyl, my lino cutting tools and cut at random. No design or preconceptions, just stab away at the vinyl and see how it goes.

lino 2

The first two or three were quite controlled, I couldn’t free myself up as much as I wanted with the smaller tools so I switched to a big, flat cutter that I rarely use and hacked away. That did the trick, it was quite satisfying feeling the tool slicing through the surface of the vinyl, a physical rather than a cerebral sensation.

More Rummaging

walnut

I had another rummage through the big drawers in my plans chest and found some more lovely papers that I’d used but didn’t do anything more with. This is a piece of paper stretched and gessoed then painted at random with my home-made walnut ink. I had taken it out on my journeys around Wales hunting megaliths and started drawing some ancient stone monuments on it, but I didn’t like the way it was going so stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. Now, what am I going to do with it?

Gold Mine In The Rain

Dolaucothi

It’s the British Bank Holiday so of course, the rain was tipping down. Husb and I got fed up looking out of the window at the Easter deluge and took off up to Dolaucothi to have a look around the Roman goldmine. It’s a lovely part of the country and we had a good time, despite the torrential sky juice.

The mines were originally worked in pre-Roman times, then the Romans invaded and took them over. Then they fell into disuse until the Victorians had a go and they finally closed in the 1940’s so there was a lot of historical stuff to see on site. I had a scribble, sheltering in the engine house and sketching the industrial machinery and landscape outside, using white, sanguine and black conté crayons into my A4 brown paper sketchbook.

Recycle, Reuse

cyanotype

I have some very big drawers for storing art and materials and I was rummaging through them earlier and found a load of papers that had been shoved to the back because I wasn’t happy with the work I’d done on them. So I pulled them out to have a think about how I can reuse them. This was a cyanotype experiment that hadn’t worked out and I already tried to recycle it by doing a life drawing on top, but I didn’t like that either. So now I’m going to try again – third time lucky? I don’t know what I’ll do yet, maybe I’ll have a digital play with it before deciding. It’s looming out at me quite darkly ………..

Abstracting The Falls

aberdulais 2

Here’s the second drawing I did at Aberdulais Falls. It’s a picturesque place that has been immortalised in art over some centuries, even being painted by Turner himself. There no way I can compete with Turner so I looked for the abstraction in nature to focus on. I sort of squinted a bit to make my vision slightly fuzzy and concentrated on drawing the shapes I saw as the falls tumbled away below me. I used firm upright and diagonal lines to represent the rocks and cliffs and freer, more squiggly lines for the water, in white, sanguine and black conté crayons into my A4 brown paper sketchbook.