The Familiar Path

At least it hasn't taken quite so long to get back onto the screen again this time and it even feels as if there is some sort of rhythm beginning to develop. Without further ado here is a piece of work being developed.

 

Here are four photographs of various surfaces but all are of the ground as is a lot of my work - they are not monochrome although they almost appear to be; next are the drawings made from the outline sections in the photos:

 

 

I used these to try to figure out what sort of marks would best work on a hard-grounded zinc plate:

 

 

These plates look black because the ground was smoked over a paraffin lamp - this makes it a lot easier to see very fine marks with an etching needle, but more difficult to draw an initial design onto the grounded surface; and here are the plates after the etch and with the ground removed

 

 Finally here are some of the initial prints:

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

There is quite a bit of potential to do further work on these such  top-rolling ; monoprinting onto the surface of one or all or various combinations; multiple overprinting; aquatinting the plates to add tone or off-setting and then aquatinting on a separate plate; and finally the possibility of reworking the plate physically by means of scraping and burnishing as I have done with this plate:

 

 

 

This is not a great photo but this is in fact the fourth state of this plate and in my next post I will show the different prints derived from this and what a difference reworking a plate can make

 

Her are a couple of images that relate closely to both my studio and essay project:

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is it? put simply wet sawdust on plaster but there is a little more to it than that - the plaster is a cast of the paving outside my studio and is the first of a series of such castings made in various places intended to show surfaces and the cracks - edges, borders, boundaries, spaces... between...the surfaces. The central intent here is to think about what happens between... what happens in the space between the surfaces and their edges. Rauschenberg talked about acting in the gap between art and life and the gap I wish to address is parallel but less obvious in that there is something always happening in the space - gap, if you wish - between surfaces ( which is in itself -surface, that is -a very malleable concept). I intend to study this space and its relation to the adjacent surfaces and to try to elicit the process that is ongoing here.

 

The sawdust jus took my fancy.