Praeterita

Copper plate etching, 6" x 4" (image size) This is the first etching I have completed in 2019. I started out by looking at one of the large oil paintings I've been making, and adapting it to this different medium: First stage of the etching: lightly sketching in the reclining figure using drypoint, then painting some spitbite aquatint in the upper part: On this proof, I wrote the timings for the four rounds of spitbite on the right-hand edge. I make an aquatint by spraying an acrylic mixture through an airbrush, then heat drying the plate for 20 minutes. Second stage: more spitbite, which turned out to be too much and resulted in a flat foul bite (burning out the tones to leave an area which doesn't hold enough ink). Third stage: so I scraped the spitbite area heavily, and drew more drypoint and burin marks, to introduce different textures to the image: Fourth stage: I step-etched the remaining white areas of the plate, then repeated the process of s...

As mentioned in an earlier post , here is the latest video Meditation, this time on Picasso's etching 'Blind Minotaur Being led by a Girl':

I've been teaching printmaking classes in the past year, and people have asked me where I studied. I tell them that I learned intaglio etching with a German artist called Thomas Gosebruch, when I was living in London. Thomas told me that he had worked for a while in the workshop of Aldo Crommelynck, who was one of the great master printers of the twentieth century. Crommelynck worked side by side with some of the greatest artists of the School of Paris - Arp, Giacommetti, Miro, Braque - helping them prepare their etching plates, making technical suggestions, etching the plates, then proofing the prints and printing the editions. In the 1960s, Crommelynck helped Picasso produce as many as 750 etchings, including the notorious 347 series, in a final masterful statement in a medium that Picasso had always loved. One of the reasons that I had decided to study printmaking was because of prints such as Picasso's. One in particular, Blind Minotaur Being Led by a Girl, I had known lo...

I've been going back through folders, looking at older work, trying to discern the threads that connect it to my current work. I looked at the first set of etchings that I made in the late 1990s, about a year after I started learning the process: It's from a set of 10 etchings called Circe , based on the Night-town section of James Joyce's Ulysses . This print illustrates the moment when Leopold Bloom fantasises that he is being ridden around the room by the madame of a brothel. It parallels the moment in Homer's myth where Ulysses' men are transformed into pigs by the sorceress Circe. There are a number of influences that brought this print into being. The first was a suggestion from my etching teacher, a great German artist and printmaker called Thomas Gosebruch who lives in London. After taking classes with him for a while, he suggested I put what I had learned to use by working on a series based on my favourite book. Perhaps he had in mind a famous set of ...