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.....