Thursday 18 October 2012

Week three part two - scale


Email correspondence with Steve Edwards - decided to change the stop out I was using to Brunswick Black. Having seen Howard Hodgkin's huge etchings at Alan Cristea's gallery over the summer, and after a conversation with Dolly Thompsett, I decided to try larger sheets of lino, to work with Brunswick Black and to remove myself from the object I was using.

These Howard Hodgkin etchings are of a vast scale - so striking. They are part of a series so the same plates are inked in different colours, often with a coloured wash added afterwards. Each print is made up of 2 to 4 sheets of paper - they must have been printed on a huge press.

I took on board Dolly's suggestion of upping the scale and used four blocks of lino butted together, each 300mm square. I dripped, sponged, scratched the Brunswick Black, added parcel tape, cracked the lino and left it to dry overnight.
4 lino plates butted up together, painted with stop out
two of the plates printed, on the drying rack
New caustic soda recipe: 200ml water, One and a half tbsp wall paper, 2 tbsp caustic soda. (Steve uses 3tbsp caustic soda). I left the sheets for 30 mins. The stop out more or less held - except the sponged areas. The parcel tape worked really well. But the lino became very bowed so didn't ink up well or run through the wood press evenly. But overall the image worked.
I inked up the four plates with relief method, using water based ink. I didn't want to remove the stop out as it contributed to the marks.
I reassembled the four prints to make one large one.

The process of working large, cutting up to small then reassembling, reminds me of the reading Andrew Hewish gave us: The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin by William S. Burroughs; cutting up and rearranging newspaper articles. So I also printed the four plates on top of each other - a further rearrangement of the images.
plates printed on top of each other, wet on wet

1 comment:

  1. OK. I like this picking up on Dolly's suggestion, upping the scale.

    What do you think happens to the images' readability when you do this? Has it worked - please critique your meaning, not just the technique.

    The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin. OK - another avenue, the cut-up method always, always ruins the narrative line.

    That's quite tricky with images. So first of all have you got any narrative line in images to ruin here? And, if so, what would be the reasons for ruining that line?

    If I remember right, Burroughs thought he might be able to tell the future by cutting up the present! So another possible foray into the supernatural might beckon...

    Automatic writing, automatic image-making. Andy Lawson and Neil Ferguson are good on both. It's about setting rules and systems.

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