Moon. Topical, symbolic, geometric, poetic, totemic.

My plan for my final piece is to create three images relating to the Moon. At the time of posting it is Mid Autumn, or moon festival, and there is an an eclipse and a large harvest moon. This was the same time of year last year that I worked on Mixed Media projects using light, Blue Moon. This links also to the work I’ve been doing a bit ahead of myself, in the Chiaroscuro unit, looking at 19th century photography.

I also reference Coleridge – Frost at Midnight- again, with that exquisite final line:

Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Thirdly, I have been reading Murakami’s 1Q84 and was inspired by the notion of the two moons in that story, the appearance of the moons seeming to signal that the characters have entered an alternative or parallel inverse. But these moons are like Coleridge’s, quietly shining, and it takes some time for the protagonists to notice them.

At a basic level though, this permits me to work with simple spiral or circular shapes, to use textures, line and movement to explore the narrative and pictorial possibilities.

Photopolymer

I was going to try to produce a tonal, painterly image using photopolymer- using the aquatint screen that I just got. There seems to be a problem though- maybe my timings are way out using the sun, rather than an exposure unit, or maybe it’s the photopolymer film that’s reacting to the climate- but the film won’t stick- I have tried several times, and this was the best, but when developing, it just peeled off altogether in one part of this image- and the rest is not exposed enough anyway.

 

Cyanotype

When I couldn’t get the photopolymer to work, I turned to a simpler way of using sun exposure: cyanotype. There’s already a nice link to the “Blue Moon” theme.

The Alternative Photography website is a great source of info for this.

http://www.alternativephotography.com/wp/processes/cyanotype/preparing-the-canvas-cloth-paper-and-natural-fibre-fabrics-for-cyanotypes

Now that I have found a source of chemicals, am all set to go with this and ferric chloride etching.

The first practical problem was the lack of anywhere lightproof in my house- this was also the difficulty with the photopolymer – we have too many windows, and all the wrong kind of lightbulbs, but I managed to black out a bit of space to dry the papers.

I soon found that the UV fluctuated a lot, and that the best images were from the really bright sun- and interesting effects when the sun was bright but slanting and casting sideways shadows.

I experimented with real objects: flat, and standing, painterly marks (using film), writing on tracing paper (it develops and then disappears again, but reappears when developed again, and pressed objects in glass.

I used the same negative- an ink wash on film- that I had tried to expose on the photopolymer film: the two moons image.

 

Finally these are the ones I want to develop into a slightly larger piece:

I like the mixture of soft and hard lines, drawn, textured and geometric, with a suggestion of perspectival and telescopic views made by the fact that there was a shadow cast by the 3-D objects, and movement caused by the breeze. The angled cylinder shape will have to be made taking account of the direction of the shadows, so will need strong sun.The image I plan to make will reflect those 18th and 19th century astronomers, working with self made tools, who discovered the age of the universe and had to try to explain to themselves as well as to others, how God still fit into the scheme of things. The confusion that the image cause to the eye is reminiscent of the shifts in perspective from believing that the stars were fixed on a crystal sphere to realising that they were floating in space.  I think it’s appropriate and slightly ironic to be using the sun to make the image.

I also find this minimalist one attractive- the two simple shapes, one a bit like a balloon, the other a solid looking object that is actually a mere shadow: lots of play on presence and absence, and the ambiguous relationship between the two shapes, flat or 3-d, moving or still: one shape looks like a pendulum, and the other seems to recede, so I have called it “Space and Time”.

I’m torn between the two- last feedback I got was to avoid doing too much. Is this personal taste? When I show these images to other people, they immediately appreciate the ones with the richest texture. In many ways, I find more to contemplate in the simpler one.

This one’s also interesting to look at- the product of accident- the liquid didn’t dry evenly, the UV wasn’t powerful enough, and in the end I abandoned it overnight, under the full moon as it happened, not that that will have done anything. But in the morning it looked like an embryo.

 

Secondly, I am going to produce a copper plate etching, now I have materials again. This is going to be using the same techniques as the “enquiring mind” piece, but will start with an image of the moon and degrade it to the point that it looks like a rock: this is using process to reflect the story of how those astronomers turned a mystical object into something more prosaic.

Sunday 11 October

So today I used a UV lamp as the weather just isn’t cooperating. It’s not as fast as the sun, and the colours aren’t as bright. I’d like to do it again if the sun comes out. This is an ink wash and carborundum on cellophane mounted on a frame, with flat shapes and 3 D objects. I moved the flat circles to create different shades, and adjusted the angle of the lamp to keep the shadow of the cylinder soft and ambiguous. I am very pleased with the quality of the lines, with the textures and the shades.

The most striking part of the image is the way a “planet” shape has emerged in the bottom right corner, with blazing light around it. There is a diagonal movement, as if a comet is moving into the skies at the top left corner. This image is channeling for me the Keats’ sonnet “On looking into Chapman’s Homer”, which is about a moment of insight, related to the thrill of discovery of a new planet.

 

BY JOHN KEATS

The “watcher of the skies” was William Herschel, who discovered Uranus after developing his own telescopes and setting up a grueling system of observation.  Herschel was also the pioneer of this cyanotype technique.

 

Of course, as looking at the set-up shows, this is a case of the “deception of images”.

 

 

Then the sun appeared again, and I was finally able to make sun exposures. I also added vinegar to bring out the cerulean blue colour. I think these are amazing in terms of their colour- it was really exciting developing them. This one doesn’t have the same trompe l’oeil effect of the one above and perhaps suggests a telescope shape instead.

The speed of the exposure in these has created different effects, in some ways less complex. The colour is phenomenal though. The main interest in these is how the movement of the circles, with their different exposure times and the way they overlapped, has created a rolling movement of transparent circles in the image.

 

 

Photopolymer again

With a chance to use a UV lamp and the weather less humid I tried again, and it’s gone better. I tried dry lamination of the plates but that didn’t work, but with a bit of access to art rooms this week I managing to do more- the uv lamp is just guesswork as it has to be hand held but I have managed to make two versions of the “two moons” plate.

Calling it “two moons” is an indication that this isn’t abstract of course- but actually it’s a pattern- a gestural mixture of painterly marks, wash and carborundum texture.

Intaglio wash

These plates were made by mounting photopolymer onto copper plates, exposing them, first to an aquatint screen ( I gave them 40 seconds under a UV bulb, hand held- it was just a guess) and then, under a plate of glass, with a black and white positive exposure, a further 40 seconds. This was then developed in washing soda, and inked and printed.

This was using a basic high-pigment black ink on a sheet of plastic, making dry, painterly brushmarks. The exposure is not correctly times, or else the development is too short: I am guessing here, as the materials are not behaving in the same way as the ones I used in the summer did. I don’t have access to a proper exposure unit, so trials are impossible.

I tried rolling over this one in a colour, just to see how it looked. The brushmarks are there, but there are open-bitten areas where the ink was black. The effect is rather like  rolled up Chinese character, and it’s not unpleasant to look at, but it isn’t what was intended.

The next one worked a lot better. Using the same timings, but two layers of negatives, creating a double spiral, and a greater range of texture. 

Again, what was supposed to be thick black areas have come out as open bite – but what is nice is the shades of grey, and the granulated textures.

I tried this one in two colours, although “viscosity printing” is a bit of a mystery to me. I tried using AKUA intaglio inks for the black, then Charbonnel, with added oil for transparency, for the colour. Then I tried Charbonnel black too, as it is nice and thick compared with Akua.

I tried again, and thought at first that this one was better, in that I did succeed in getting some black where it should be, but it’s not evenly exposed- no doubt something to do with the lamp being being hand-held.

So when I compare them, the one on the right has the most successful variety of marks and tones.

 

Intaglio and collograph on perspex

I said I would come back to this one and I have. This is the same plate as I used to explore gestural marks, and was quite destructive; I came back to it with some “healing” layers- acrylic (screenfiller) and gauze to act as plasters over some of the cracks, and to patch the surface, while also creating solidity- shape and texture- with some carborundum. I was after real solid blacks, and “monumental” shapes. Again they were just made intuitively, and any suggestion or symbolism is unconscious.

I like the textures of the gauze, and the watercolour effect of the acrylic. The black is really dense. I wonder if I could achieve something like lithographic effects using these materials?
The open bite is quite marked though, and there would be no way to avoid this on perspex I guess? Aquatint screen using spray paint? Or just not using the Dremel.

This is the second print from the same plate.

Interesting though that was, I then finally found a source of ferric chloride, which meant I could turn back to using copper etching.

Copper plate etching

One issue this time was that the copper plates I have are significantly thicker than the one I degraded last time, so it would take more time.

The first stage was to make a test plate to test the new ferric solution. That meant making an aquatint layer with acrylic ink and masking the plate in strips. Now, you would have thought that, having done this before, I would have got it right, but I managed to count backwards and fail to get an even spread of exposure times. However, the test was enough to let me know that the solution worked quite effectively and fast, and that 30 seconds, 1 minute 2 minutes, four minutes up to 20 minutes was probably the range I as after for aquatint etching.

My plan was to degrade a plate down to a circular shape, but to create layers of different depth. The first thing I did was make an aquatint layer and then paint ink and water in the desired shape. You can see the fine mist of the aquatint layer in the picture. The black ink here would stop out the ferric, and the wash part would get eaten.

I put this in Ferric for 10 minutes, as a first layer, then cleaned it and printed it. The contrasts were not sharp yet. Then I made another layer using no aquatint layer this time, just using pigment from oil-based ink, mixed with water.

This time, when printed, the contrasts were sharp, and the background a lovely velvety black.

The next stage was to start really degrading the copper. Using Johnson’s floor polish as a hard ground/ stop out on both sides, I scratched into the exposed background with an etching needle to make the surface easier to attack with the salts. Then I scratched some lines through the hard ground so that holes would be created. This process took two days and one night. Finally I was left with the roughly textured circle of copper.

This shape was then inked in black, and set in a composition with a ruled circle- this was a ready made zinc circle which I ruled with an etching tool to make dotted lines – and another cardboard circle to make an embossed shape.

The thinking here was to contrast the materials, the shapes, the surfaces, and thereby the connotations-

the etched copper, its plate warm golden red in colour, rough, accidental, degraded, the irrational, the experienced, the harvest moon, the real: the accidental uncorroded piece of copper giving it a “base” a bit like a crystal ball, so also connoting the supernatural

the scored zinc, silver grey, cold, precise, measured, the logical, rational, the plan, the abstraction, the plan, the analysis: the image is like a pie-chart, mathematical, but the lines also suggest a clock face, and the accidental cloud shapes on the surface, possibly caused by humidity, further connote the passage of time (and it also made me thing of the cloud passing the moon/ eye in the surrealist “Un Chien Andalou” in an inversion of the rational)

the cardboard circle- un-inked, untouched, the blank, the conceptual, the pure, the unreal, the non-existent, the Platonic form.

 

I was not satisfied with the composition. And time ran out for using the press, as a class of students arrived. So I will just reflect on what is wrong and what might be changed.

The juxtaposition reminded me of Joseph Kosuth, “Three chairs and one”, the forms of the same object, drawing attention to the relativism and constructed nature of all instantiations of a single concept.

There was something I didn’t like about this group of three- the way a group of three immediately suggests narrative progression- or is that just me?- there’s an immediate sense of before, now and then, or a suggestion of causation which didn’t please me at all with this. Would having just two items make a difference to that? Would an arrangement in a straight line be less annoying? Does the whole thing need more space?

I removed the embossed shape and quickly re-printed. The cloud formation on the zinc was gone, and possibly won’t be recreated.

There’s still an inevitable balance between the two- or tension. The orientation makes a difference. Is it balanced in too obvious a way? There is a clear organic vs geometric opposition- order vs chaos, yin and yang.

The meaning of it is forming in my head and I think I know what has to be done.

 

For this next project, I wanted to try to create an image of a hand- also inspired by the 19th century photo.

I drew my own one, and planned a series of steps:

1. Stop out acrylic marker for whites
2. Aquatint layer
3. 3 sets of greys: 30 seconds, 1 minute (for the background) and 3 minutes exposure
4. Soft lines/ shadows on soft ground
5. Fine lines on hard ground (Lascaux)

 

I photographed with lateral light:

The final version came out very hard though, because the acrylic liner gives very hard edges. I thought the subsequent layers would work to break them down, but they stayed quite hard. This is the version with the plan for the hard lines.

It ended up rather scary, considering it was my own hand. It looks flayed, and I somehow lost the greys.

 

I tried to compensate for the hardness by printing on soft paper again. I need to do a monoprint or something to tone down all the lines, and the hard edges of white. How could I have reversed that during the etch?

 

 

The monoprints and drypoint were ok, but it was time to use my new materials, and plan an image using multiple techniques of engraving. I sketched my ideas, and wrote a list to follow, as it’s hardly intuitive yet.

This would involve masking- again, using photopolymer. I decided to make two parallel images, using the positive and the negative mask.

Here are the cut masks ready for sun exposure of laminated copper plates.

The lamination, exposure and developing all went well. The delicacy of the laminate was demonstrated when I realised that the tiny cut I had made into the black paper in order to start the shape was exposed- a tiny sliver of fixed polymer. It was ok, some caustic soda on a cotton bud removed it.

I now had two plates, a negative and a positive apple shape. I started with the negative. I was very keen to try a “tonal wash” which I had a recipe for from Capileira- it involved using a mixture of Graphic Chemical black ink with  high level of pigment, and demineralised water. The two could be moved around on the surface of the plate, and the pigment would be released and will dissolve, forming a surface with a variety of tones and grains, which would substitute for an aquatint layer. It was a technique that could be controlled, ink wiped off with brushes, and redone until it was good. This was the result. I like the swirling patterns: they make me think of the dawn of the universe.

I liked it and decided to use the same technique on the other plate. Having done one, this was now relatively easy, and simple. I etched them for 18 minutes. The unexpected thing here was that the hardened photopolymer was hard to remove, and small dots remained on the plate that I could not remove with caustic soda.  In fact, they work quite well, as otherwise this is quite a simple image. Now they suggest stars, adding to the sense of this shape being a world.

 

Now back to the other plate. I removed the photopolymer successfully with caustic, and made an aquatint layer with an airbrush and acrylic – concentrating a dense spray on the highlighted part of the shape. The background now had to be stopped out, which I did by painting a layer of acrylic ink- also making a fine line on the apple, to create a thin highlight. The shading was done using a wax crayon- two layers of dark and light grey, and sharp lines engraved with a needle. The stop-out ink was hard to remove from the background though, and I wonder if this could have been done differently.

 

 

Evaluation:

The background of this one may be too busy, and too dark- going back to the original photo, the grey background rally set off the contoured apple.

 

 

 

 

At one stride comes the dark. 

Well, this topic is all about avoiding that happening, about graduating tones to make the dark creep in, allow light to create form by moulding itself to the contours of what it meets.

The inspiration for this series of prints was a book on Science and Art- “Visualisations” by Martin Kemp, which explores the use of analogical thinking in the development of Science. The particular chapter was one in which the use of lateral lighting in 19th century photography was used to create analogies with the moon, and thus to try to understand how its surface had been formed. The three images which illustrated this were very striking- an early, very clear photograph of a wrinkled apple, floating against a grey background, and a side-lit image of a wrinkled hand, and a stunningly clear image of the moon itself from 1874.

(There is more info on these images and the book they come from here: interesting!

The Moon considered as a Planet, a World and a Satellite

 

Newton’s apple

That impossible floating apple is very striking, and makes me think of Newton’s apple, and the apple of the Bible, and the idea of falling, and degenerating. And the coming of the dark. It’s a potent symbol.

There’s also the fact that that’s a fabulous photo that would take some improving on. I started by recreating it with pencil, then sketching some real apples from my tree, and starting to think of ways to handle the subject matter.

I also took some photos with directional light sources:

 

 

 

 

 

Monoprint

Still my first response, monoprint, , and felt that, with a mask, I should be able to get sharp edges that would make that lateral lighting work.  Starting with a delicate wiping off, and trying to create more contrast:

Then I tied making texture using brush strokes, the trick with this being to get the same degree of dryness for all the tones. I used a mask to create an even background. I thought this one worked quite well.

This one was bolder- but using delicate paper resulted in a tear.

Finally a much bolder one, using a knife to apply the ink: the use of a mask made a very hard edge.

Intaglio: Drypoint

Still focussing on pencil type- lines, I decided to try intaglio on perspex. The first version of this was done with a wobbly needle stuck in a cork, and wasn’t very dynamic. It had cross-hatching for the background, and contour lines on the apple shape.

Now I had some tools, and a press, so etched it better, and inked it up. Again I found that adding oil to the ink helped to get darker colours.

I was quite pleased with the results: Newton’s apple.

I made some more marks to get a more dramatic black: it may have lost some of the line definition, but I also was a bit more selective in rubbing off.

This felt quite successful, and a good use of drypoint etching to create a quite dramatic result.

As I said, I spent a day in the Prado this summer, and felt that I had to use the experience to start thinking about the topic of Chiaroscuro. There is something, to my mind, very European about it, not just because it was a Renaissance technique, but also because the whole phenomenon of lateral lighting, long sunrises and sunsets, are associated with Europe for me. Here in Hong Kong, “at one stride comes the dark”; dusk does not linger.

The image that inspired me was Caravaggio’s David and Goliath, and I set about trying to achieve a similar image using different media.

Here are the sketchbook pages- the softer image was done by using ground charcoal. The challenge would be to achieve anything like this kind of softness using printmaking techniques. Approaching it in a reductive manner was easier- lifting off where light struck the body.

At this stage, I had no new materials, as they were still en route from Valencia, so it was back to monoprinting.

I tried various techniques- additive and subtractive, using different tools, brushes, sponges, knives, cotton, using stand oil and solvents to thin the inks, and add various degrees of viscosity and painterliness.

Sometimes the oil stained the lightweight paper.

Woodblock

Then I decided to try a woodblock. At first this printed very faintly, but I had bought new inks and a new roller and found that these made a big difference. The old inks/ roller:

New inks and large roller. Inks diluted with oil wash.

 

I’m not too happy with my cut marks here though- they are rather crude. I was waiting for a Dremel to arrive amongst the new materials.

Lino

I started a square print, planning a reductive print using caustic soda on lino, in order to avoid these harsh cut lines. I haven’t got back to it yet.

I haven’t completed Assignment 2 yet, although my landscape morphed into abstraction.  I will revisit.

Why chiaroscuro? Because printing is all about getting blacks black and whites white. And the interesting thing is how to achieve the effects in between.

Why now? Because I visited the Prado for the first time this summer, and am in a Renaissance frame of mind, and you can’t say “chiaroscuro” without thinking of Caravaggio, of whom I think the PM 2 course designer is a fan. I’m also finding myself interested in science, or at least the history of it, in particular how “artistic” thinking and “scientific” thinking relate to one another. And I’m having to deal with the chemistry of etching. My son says it “sounds like Breaking Bad over there.”

Secondly, I have taken part in a non-toxic Intaglio workshop in Capileira, where I learned about both etching in ferric chloride, and the technique of photopolymer intaglio- the latter is a real challenge in terms of creating blacks.

Reference texts:

Kemp, M. (2000) Visualisations: The Nature Book of Art and Science. OUP, Oxford, UK.

(History of Science)

Honour H. and Fleming J. (2009) A World History of Art (Revised). Laurence King, London, UK.

Wallace, R. (1971) The World of Leonardo. Time Inc., NY,  USA.

Coughlan, R. (1971) The World of Michaelangelo. Time Inc., NY,  USA.

Jimenez-Blanco, M.D. (ed.) (2014) The Prado Guide. Museo Nacional del Prado Difusion, Madrid, Spain.

Boegh, H. (2007) Handbook of Non-toxic Intaglio.

Hoskins, S and Pearce, R. The Chemistry of Ferric Chloride. Printmaking Today Vol. 4, no. 2.  Accessed via www. artmondo.net.

 

 

 

I have already said, that I interpret abstraction here as a process, and have explored different processes, letting the  processes determine the outcome, to a degree. It’s like trying to “automate” the work- a bit like how Surrealists came up with their abstract images, except without the Freudian element.

So, it’s a case of putting the plate materials together with the things that will damage or degrade them and trying things out. I am particularly keen on the copper plate and ferric chloride process, and wanted to see how far I could go in damaging/ degrading a plate.

So I used this plate, the small one that had already been experimented on, on both sides.

I had used it as a test plate in Capileira to determine times for aquatint etching, with brushpainting of stop-out at 5 minute intervals. This would be the front.

Then, also in Capileira, trying out hard ground with etched lines, to add areas of dark and outlines.

Then the other side had been used at home to test my materials and solution:

Now I wanted to experiment with degrading the plate to the point of break-up.

I masked one side – the one immediately above- with a plastic shape, roughly like a wave, covering just over half, then masked the other side with a layer of Lascaux hard ground, mirroring the same shape. On the hard ground, I etched lines, concentrating on the already weakened areas, and adding shapes suggesting holes. Then I put it in the ferric chloride overnight.

And got the most exciting result.

There is still a trace of the original etch, and the curved lines complement the cut holes. The ragged edges, and the marks, suggest to me a brain, but also echo the “moon” images I’ve been working on, with crater-like shapes and shadows, looking ahead to  the “Chiaroscuro” assignment. The shape is beautiful, and can be printed in multiples to create new shapes, with a pleasing organic quality, but just a hint of a graphic question mark shape, which is why I’m calling it “the questioning mind”- but beneath what might appear to be a celebration of curiosity, there is also the idea of degradation, of things being eaten away, deterioration. technically, I love the softness of the etched surface against the crispness of the edges, and the way those edges hold the ink.

Printed in multiples:

The plate itself is a thing of beauty, with the colours of the copper and the contrasting grey green of the verdigris; just lovely.

What I take away from this is the value of testing materials to see what happens. The shapes have ended up again, like the experiment with breaking perspex, organic, because they represent what happens rather than what I have designed. This again, is an almost  “automatic” image, in the tradition of using unconscious processes to create (yes, there is some intervention, but it’s reduced.)

If only I could get hold of the materials (getting the ferric here is proving a challenge even though it’s standard in the electronics industry); I’d love to do more of this.
This will be the technique I use in my final piece for this assignment.

So, this was a copper plate etching I started on my last day at this summer’s Non-toxic intaglio course.

It is a combination of different techniques, so really just evolved as I practices various things, but the design principle was simple- keep balancing shapes, lines and textures.

The first stage here was to make a mask to protect certain areas form the ferric chloride bath. I could have used various stop-out methods, but the one that would give the securest edge and solid shapes, seemed to be with a sheet of photopolymer film.

So I’ll just go through the stages here,as this was so much about technique and craft practice, and as these processes are still new to me, I need to record them:

Mask layer

Laminated the copper plate with photopolymer film

Make a mask – I tore paper, and created some block shapes at angles- these had a mix of cut and torn edges.

The photopolymer film was exposed under a UV lamp, but could have been done in the sun (No need for an aquatint layer, as this was just black/ white), edges cut and left to harden for 2 minutes. Then it was developed in washing soda, which removed all the unexposed film and left the rest of the copper clear. (A quick dip in ferric chloride will determine if the film is completely removed, as the plate will oxidize if it is. De-oxidise in salt/ vinegar solution and dry)

I also hardened it in the sun to turn the photopolymer dark purple, but this may not have been necessary.

Aquatint layer

Without an aquatint layer, the copper would be open-bitten- that is to say, in large areas, there would be nothing on the eroded copper to hold the ink, except for the edges of the shapes. To create an aquatint layer that would resist the ferric chloride, I had to spray on a fine layer of acrylic using an airbrush.

Aquatint etching

Then started the process of creating layers using different exposure times. I had already got a list of times from practice plates.

I already had a white layer from my mask, so was not going to stop out anything in this first layer, which would end up as the darkest areas. One of the first things I did was to cut, with an engraving tool, a geometric shape- a thin line to counteract the solid shapes. This was cut into the masked area as well, to break up those shapes. (That was not recommended by the workshop leader, as it would result in harsh lines, which I liked the sound of however)

Then, using different stop-out material- a hard wax crayon, which I knew from my practice plate would give a textured result- and brushed on stop-out (Lascaux acrylic ink)- I made  layers of grey, with times ranging from 5 , 10 and 15. After each exposure to ferric chloride, the plate had to be deoxidised to make sure the stop-out materials would stick.

Finally the plate was dipped in caustic soda, which would remove all the acrylic- though this is best done in Mystrol, which is a bit less strong- but the caustic would take off the photopolymer film.

This is the first inked plate- some the different greys didn’t come out clearly but probably would have if I’d inked them again- they seemed to improve in subsequent inkings. It was all a bit rushed at this stage as time was running out and I might have left too much ink on. On the other hand, I had exposed the first layer for 5 minutes, quite long for a solution that worked to differentiate at intervals of one minute or less at the start of the process. The maximum length of time for dipping in that particular ferric solution was recommended to be 20 minutes to achieve black, and I hadn’t used all that time. I wanted to leave more room for working. But I was reasonably happy with this early result. The lines in the mask are indeed harsh, scored looking, not delicate. The wax crayon worked well. The other layers are not visible in this photo. There is clearly a bit of open bite where my aquatint layer may not have been thick enough, but it has created a happy accident that looks like a light source down the right hand side. I wanted this to have a floating effect, with planes going off at different angles, but it’s still quite flat in this print.

I kept the plate and brought it back with me, and once I had got all my own materials together, and had practiced with the timings, I added more layers to this.

Hard Ground

First up, I covered the back to protect it, and, after deoxidising the plate, brushed on a hard ground layer (Johnson’s Floor polish), then pressed two weights of sandpaper onto it and ran through my new press. I added more lines, using etching tools. After etching in the ferric chloride  I found that the sandpaper marks were rather slight, just visible in the centre as a few pale dots, so decided to have another go with soft ground. (15 minutes etch in my solution, which seemed to be working faster than the one at the workshop) There was also an interesting accident, in that perhaps some of the hard ground is not properly cleaned off and there are some pale marks where the wax crayon texture should be. This is certainly all much lighter now than the first inking. The etching tools- rockers as well as needles have created different line qualities- some quite soft. It has started to have a sensation of receding depths/ multiple planes.

Soft ground

This was an oil-based soft ground, which had to rolled on with a soft roller in a thin layer. (Of course this is not a smooth surface now, but should still work I thought) Then I placed the sandpaper on it again, plus some tarlatan, covered with an oiled layer of Mylar, and ran through the press. This was etched again ( 15 minutes)

The result is now much more complex, with an interesting variety of lines and shapes.

The torn sandpaper edges have added more organic shapes, and the tarlatan texture helps to mesh shapes together. There is an interesting range of greys, and the original solid shapes have now been modulated. I must admit I am still quite unsure of the exact science of what has happened, and how these originals have been affected when they were under a mask- but presumably the uneven surface that I was applying the ground to meant the ground was a bit uneven too. I’m not sure how deeply bitten areas get to look less bitten now- that’s not possible- but maybe it’s to do with the overall relative levels. or maybe I’m just inking better.

The two images above were just trying out the different new inks I’d got. I felt the Charbonnel was very thick. I could try out some viscosity printing- that’s something of a mystery to me as well.

Here is the plate: it’s clear that there are brush marks at the edges where the hard ground wasn’t entirely brushed on. The depth of that initial harsh cut through the mask is clear here too.

 

I printed it again on coloured banana paper which softens the whole thing and picks up the delicate grey tones created by the sandpaper on the soft-ground stage, as well as the larger marks of the rougher sandpaper from the hard ground stage.

Overall, I like the image, but it has been an experiment in repeating the etching process to achieve layers of different marks. I feel I could control some of these now.

I keep seeing geographical and political analogies in the image- an aerial view of a landscape, the Gulf of Aden,   fields laid out for agriculture, erosion of water, fishing, ruled lines in the landscape, like those straight ones made in the sand, ironically, in the middle east, a bombing sight, a pointing finger- and the awareness that this is damage, that some violence has been done to this plate, with sharp tools, with abrasive surfaces- and that tarlatan now looks like a frayed bandage.

I’m aware that I’m probably more excited by this result just because it’s a new process, and I’m using new materials, but I do have a sensation of having moved to an other level with this, and my previous monoprints are now looking very simplistic. It’s also a bittersweet feeling, because I’m now writing this up in Hong Kong, having had to leave a lot these materials behind, including my press of course, and am trying to restock here and feeling very frustrated.

 

This was another new technique- quite a simple one, but in keeping with the Breaking Bad approach I’m veering towards at the moment, with my new found interest in Science.

This is the use of Ammonium iron (III) citrate, and potassium ferricyanide to create a light sensitive wash to make cyanotypes, which can be exposed under the sun. I love this simple way of making images appear, and it also, like the photopolymer method, takes me back to the days of developing photos in a darkroom and seeing the images emerge.

Abstraction here happens with distance- physical distance- if you choose to use actual objects to create inverse silhouettes, then the closer they are to the surface, the sharper and more realistic they appear.

So this image was made with textures pressed quite close to the paper with a glass on top (the edges of which appear). This closeness means there are hard edges, except in the case of the cotton wool, which has created an interesting cloud-like texture. Although the contrast between geometric and organic is quite interesting, this is a bit literal, as it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out what the objects and materials are.

So this was another version, this time with a distance between the objects and the paper and exposed it for 35 minutes outside- an overcast day, or this would have been quicker, and sharper. This had been a planned composition, using household objects (insert photos from phone) to suggest a theme (childbirth). I chose the most gruesome kitchen utensils I could find, metal tongs, an old fashioned tinopener, hooks… I left the paper a bit too long under the running water which then added a pattern of holes: this seemed to complement the theme of violence, so was a lucky accident.

 

I wanted to get something in-between here- semi- abstract, so pinned some of the objects down and tried again:

It now has more of a suggestion of growth perhaps, and the less sharp parts now take on a ghostly image, a bit like an ultrasound scan.

Another technique that could be used with this method is negative films- made my sketching onto tracing paper, or using a photograph. Thsi was only an afternoon workshop, so there wasn’t too much time to experiment, but I had this photo prepared- again, my kitchen tools, but reimagined as a rather harsh “holy trinity”.

This is possibly a little underexposed.

Similarly with this one- should have been exposed longer- I was using similar scribbling/ markmaking to that use on plexiglass- this time with graphite on tracing paper- the edges of which can be seen. I like the drawn line texture and the shades.

Right now, I don’t have the chemicals to experiment with this technique further, but I like the possibilities it offers, and would be interested in combining the images with other techniques- the fact that this image is waterproof is handy, as the paper can be wet again for, say, intaglio.