Full Circle

Adventures in Lithography and various stages in between.........

A couple of months ago, some friends and I booked a cottage near Skipton and organised a creative weekend.  Amazingly, it did actually turn into a creative weekend - we did loads of creating and very little boozing.  Cath Brooke organised the artistic endeavours, with warm-ups by Rozi Fuller. We combined drawing from the views in the garden with printmaking inside, and a lovely walk to draw  in the Colne Valley, where we were surprised by a flock of sheep, but not as surprised as the shepherd who chanced upon us sitting on the other side of the wall.

A couple of weeks previously we'd been to see an exhibition of Lithographs at West Yorkshire Print Workshop, and, though, frankly, a lot of the pieces left us (well, me anyway) rather cold, we were struck by a beautiful print by John Piper based on a landscape in Connemara.

By the way, if you want a good old drool, just do an image search on John Piper (especially Stones).

John Piper - Stones & Bones

We set up in the garden of the cottage and drew images of the valley, walls, and houses, using big rolls of lining paper and markers on sticks, wax crayon for resists, and ink wash.  All drew and made marks on the same piece of paper which created some great random effects and surprisingly few turf wars.

Then we used a colour drypoint technique Cath & I learnt a couple of years ago with printmaker Kip Gresham (again, thank you WYPW) to produce prints from detailed sections of the large paintings.

 The work remained in piles in my workshop for a couple of months, until I signed up for a lithography workshop with Kate Desforges at WYPW and thought it would be interesting to see if I could go full circle, from the inspiration of the original Piper lithograph, via the creative weekend, to my own lithograph piece.  I also wanted to find a technique whereby I could produce hand-pulled prints of my jewellery pieces, but that's another story.

I took a marvellous couple of days out of the day to day work of making jewellery, sitting in the garden drawing, redrawing, using sticks, pens, various pencils, indian and sepia ink, charcoal,  collage - wonderfully indulgent!

When it came to synthesising the preparation work into one image I could turn into a print, the difficulties arose, and I had a few Van Gogh moments of despair, surrounded by cutouts & Pritt Stik in the kitchen. Photo lithography gives you a brilliant opportunity to reproduce exact marks, and I wanted to exploit the chance to enlarge these and convey the unintended shapes and patterns.  However, (as usually my problem) the general composition was refusing to come together.

Also as usual with me, it was a chance laying down of a negative cutout on top of something else that pulled me out of the mire, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Once I had the composition I decided to go through the laborious process of redrawing the whole thing to unify it.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the discipline of doing this.

The photo lithograph process is pretty straightforward development of a plate to produce an exact image, in much the same way as you would with a screen print (though my experience of this is limited - it's the one printing process I haven't got on with).  Unlike most printmaking methods where the making of the plate is the tricky part and the inking and printing fairly straightforward (or as straightforward as you want it to be), the trick with lithography is the actual printing part.  It works on the principle of the antipathy between oil and water, and you have to keep the plate at the right level of moisture.  Anyway, this is the print I produced.......

It's really just a starting point, and I want to use it as a layer with other techniques, probably introducing blocks of colour or brushed elements, maybe some collage landscape elements but this may over-complicate the nice simple composition I've managed, despite myself, to end up with.

I quite like this idea - another happy accident when I laid the transparency on top of the litho plate, which makes me wonder about using it as an interlocking pattern, even a textile print. We'll see.....

A Walk in the Park

Post Christmas, I was a bit....meh.  I'd bust a gut getting stuff ready for galleries and shops, then more literally bust a gut 'doing' the whole festive bit, and January was a bit of an anticlimax, as it is for most people.  Although some optimistic souls I know were all full of the joys of a new year, new challenges, and a bloodstream devoid of alcohol, none of this was really catching my imagination.

Then I got an email from the Craft & Design Gallery in Leeds, one of my favourite stockists, inviting me to put a collection in to the exhibition they were planning on the subject of A Walk in the Park.  And Lo, for there was a new spring in my step, an opportunity to do something new, explore some new ideas, stress about a new deadline.

As usual I had plenty of ideas - some new, some still unexplored as I write (adventure playgrounds, the lines, the organic woodiness, the possibilities......), and some that had been in the sketchbook for years.  Something that I have learned (and relearned again and again and one day it might sink in) is that I never allow myself enough time to fully develop my designs before starting work, but I'm not sure that I ever will.  My 'design process' usually consists of brainstorming design ideas, having great ideas in the bath, and fiddling around with various pieces of etched metal I pick up in my workshop until I get something I like. (I've talked about my working processes in the Blog hop blog).


So, cue the Tony Hart music, here's what I came up with......

Magpies, an obsession for many people, I know.  I do love a corvid (Arabel's Raven is one of my favourite books ever), and they always remind me of the time I first came to Leeds, 25 years ago, when I was struck by the numbers of them that hung around in Hyde Park.  I'd never seen so many, being an impoverished Londoner.  Nowadays they hang around in my suburban garden and recently spent a long time in competition with a squirrel in trying to acquire a duster which had been hanging on my washing line for quite a long time. I'd always come across a snag when trying to design a big magpie necklace, as although I'm not superstitious you never know, do you, and I couldn't just do one magpie.  Then one of those bath inspiration moments when I realised I could do a reversible pendant, 2 magpies for the price of one (or even 3, if you want to, and boys are your thing).

Taking the colours of the park, the blue skies (?!), the green spaces, I incorporated some enamelled elements into some of the pieces.

Birds in trees watching the proceedings, or just getting on with life and survival, and landscapes, willows, dogwoods, buildings........

 

I'm really pleased with this last one, the only one with figures in it to make it to a finished piece.  Here I was trying to get a bit of that 'Abney & Teal' vibe of the urban park, with the tower blocks in the background.  I've been using one of my makers mark punches to make the square windows in things, which is quite clever of me, don't you think?

And finally, something which just didnt make it into the exhibition, but which I really like.  Here come the practicalities of making jewellery I've spoken about before........I had enough large neckpieces, plus I didnt want to spoil that particular composition by drilling holes in it.  (I did make another piece involving a riveted on back with holes for hanging, and some figures, but wasn't really sure about it).

It really wants to be a brooch for a coat or scarf, as the cutout piece will frame a nice fabric showing through, but a sterling brooch back would make it very expensive for a copper and brass piece, I don't like to confuse things by using base metal findings and anyway they're difficult to stick on reliably.  I attempted to make a copper brooch pin myself, which would have been ok if I had several more weeks to battle with soldering it on properly, but as this was the night before the deadline I didnt really have that option.  Anyway, it looks pretty I think and may make a good card or picture before it finds a role as a piece of jewellery.

A Walk in the Park  is at the Craft & Design Centre in Leeds (under the Art Gallery)