A printmaker's Easter

The few days over the bank holiday weekend have been quite intensely printmakerish and really rather good. As well as getting plenty of studio time to work on my Green Door print exchange submission (more on that later), I was able to see Urban Evolution, an exhibition of prints by Anne Desmet at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in Lymington. It’s an intimate space, ideal for her linocuts, wood engravings and collages, most of which focus on architectural themes. That’s an extremely inadequate way to describe the exhibition - Anne Desmet takes wood engraving to a whole new level – but I think I need to digest the exhibition catalogue before I can say more.

Today at Red Hot Press, I had the opportunity to see a demonstration of a new etching ground developed by Andrew Baldwin at Aberystwyth University. Sarah heard about the ground at last year’s Impact conference in Bristol and has been using it since with good results. The beauty of this ground is that it doesn’t give off unpleasant fumes like other liquid hard grounds and is therefore safer to use – a big plus for educational establishments and open access workshops. It doubles as a hard and soft ground too. It’s rolled onto the plate like ink and at this point can be used as a soft ground, or bake it on the hot plate for half an hour and you have a hard ground. It’s red instead of the traditional brown which makes working on and etching the plate easier too. Sarah’s not sure if it’s available commercially yet but she gives it the thumbs up so I hope to give it a go sometime soon.

Image: Anne Desmet, Deserted Pool VMB, linocut 2007

Exhibition update

The summer exhibition frenzy is almost at an end now. Oxmarket has been and gone; sold three prints, all of them dark, so I may have to rethink my supposition that people don’t like gloomy images on their walls! Hampshire Open Studios finished at the weekend. The Wayzgoose was well attended and Southampton Ukulele Jam tore the place up with tunes such as Rawhide and Come Up and See Me. Some lucky person won a copy of the Made in Southampton limited edition box set; fifteen original prints by members of Red Hot Press presented in a hand-made folio, complete with a specially commissioned forward by Philip Hoare, winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. Print Zero Print Exchange 6 exhibition opened in Seattle on Saturday and I’ve just got to get my selected work to the workshop for it to be taken to Bristol for IMPACT 6, then that’s it for this year I think. Time to concentrate on producing some new work.

Bitterne Sugar Lift

The sisters are just about finished – I think – so image will be posted when the ink is dry. IMPACT 6 submission was delivered today; two weeks to wait to see if I’ve been selected. Work ready to go to Oxmarket Galleries in Chichester next week for exhibition at the end of this month/ beginning of August. Work framed and ready for Hampshire Open Studios in August. It’s all coming together.

Further images for The Undertaker’s Nuptials are just not doing at the moment so I’m experimenting with sugar lift. At the moment, I’m leaving the areas where the ground lifted off the plate open (see above) but although the results are interesting, they’re not giving me the contrasts I want. So on the advice of Arizona Jim, eminent printmaker and all-round good egg, I’ve ordered me some pine resin to use as an aquatint. It arrived today - in big lumps - so pestle and mortar needed first. Or some such. This is going to be fun.