Susie Turner

Susie Turner, Cotinous Grace, photopolymer intaglio print, 2013

Interesting talk last Friday by printmaker Susie Turner who visited Red Hot Press to give a solar plate masterclass over the weekend.

Susie talked about her processes and the ideas behind her work. She is particularly interested in nature and the changing seasons. There seems to be quite a pleasing conflict in some of her work between order and chaos. She arranges many of the elements in an orderly, systematic way, but nature will do its own thing and always brings a little disorder to the images. At least, no two elements are the same, whether leaves, feathers or seeds, no matter how regular the pattern they're arranged in. 

Have a look at her work on her website here.

No escape...

Feels good to be starting a new etching... apart from my small North and South print at the beginning of the year, it’s been a while. Not quite sure where this one will go but it will have monoprinted elements as well.

A couple of months ago, we had a session looking at our progress so far with North and South. One of my fellow printmakers said to me of my image, ‘it’s very you.’ It got me thinking about the work (and lack of!) I’d been trying to make over the last eighteen months or so, and how I’d been trying to move away from narrative ‘illustrative’ images. Without much success. It was a really useful comment as it made me remember that you can’t really escape yourself when it comes to making art - you have to make the work you make. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to progress and push your work forward - it’s still perfectly possible and vital to do that. You just can’t force your work in a direction it doesn’t want to go. So, for me it’s back to weird, slightly grotesque narrative images. The techniques will change though, and that's what will push the work forward.

And if anyone is wondering where the life drawing has gone, that’s all on hold at the moment as too much other stuff going on. I imagine I'll get back to it at some point.

Soft ground etching day

Taught a one-day soft ground etching workshop last weekend. Here are some of the fabulous prints produced (apologies for he rubbish photographs - they really don't do the prints justice!).
 

Tuesday life drawing

Drawings made on four A4 etching plates this week. Three of the plates have already been etched, one not, so we'll see what happens...

Tuesday life drawing is back

 This term's life drawing started up this week. Made three A4 drawings on tissue over a soft ground so that should give me something to work with for a while. Three plates on the go at once! Four if you count my Small Faces. New way of working for me.

Definitely feeling rusty after the Christmas break but one of the good things about this way of working is that it doesn't matter if the drawings aren't any good - I can just remove the bits I don't want.

Palimpsest continued

 





















Here is the first print in my Palimpsest series; three drawings, two of which were the same, the final one made directly on the plate last Saturday at life drawing.

And here's the second plate etched and printed. This is the first stage of the next Palimpsest print. Printed a small edition of four of these, even though this isn't the final image. 

An art-filled week

Although last week was a bad one domestically (leaky pipes and plumbers – AGAIN), it was a good week for art. There was life drawing on Saturday - poses inspired by Degas’s intimate paintings of women going about their daily rituals; studio time on Sunday; an intaglio supervised practice session at the workshop on Tuesday which was fun – three people using four different techniques (as technician/facilitator, that kept me on my toes!); on Wednesday I gave someone at work some advice about drawing and critiqued a portrait he was working on, and on Saturday, I received an email from Green Door Printmaking Studio in Derby announcing this year’s international print exchange. A delightfully varied week – rare these days. If only there could be more like those!

An unusual project

I’ve been given a rather interesting project by a friend of mine. She’s a creative type herself; a garden designer primarily with massage and naturopathy thrown in. She recently had some fairly extensive remodelling done on her house and found a piece of the original wallpaper still attached to the wall. The house was built in 1928 so the paper is rather elderly. My mission is to turn it into a plate of some sort, collagraph I guess, and print from it. It’s quite heavily embossed so I’m hoping that with a few coats of varnish, I can stop it from flattening as it goes through the press. I shall try printing it both intaglio and relief to see what I get.

Card cuts at Red Hot Press

I spent a very pleasant day last Friday teaching a card cut workshop at Red Hot Press. My three students, all of whom are practising artists and printmakers, were delightful company and created some interesting images.

We spent the morning looking at the different effects that can be produced with card cuts; line, tone and texture, and the variables such as types of card and varnish. My students then made some plates and varnished them. We had a relaxing lunch whilst waiting for the varnish to dry, then spent the afternoon printing and experimenting with intaglio and relief techniques.

Something that struck me was how difficult it can be for experienced artists to learn new techniques sometimes. I think to avoid discouragement, it’s important to stop oneself from becoming too bound up in the image. One should try to concentrate on the technique itself; mark-making and experimenting with all the variables a particular medium offers. Maybe look at the final image in detail, picking out what works and what doesn’t, rather than viewing the image a whole.

Image by Ruth Barrett-Danes

What a good day I had yesterday.
After five long months intaglioless, I finally got a chance to get thoroughly inky again. There’s nothing so satisfying as being able to look at one’s blackened fingernails and ink-stained skin, knowing that there’s a batch of freshly pulled prints – good ones at that – flattened under boards to dry.

I really didn’t expect to pull so many good ones yesterday. Five months is a long time to be away from one’s work. Prior to that, I was printing and etching every other week and working on the plates in between. Working that intensively, you become familiar with all the little nuances of the plates; you know exactly how much ink to use, which areas need a little more or a little less; how to wipe, where to wipe vigorously, where to wipe gently. As you pull each proof, you study it and notice all its subtleties, making decisions almost subconsciously as you go along. It sounds poncey I know, and I like to think I’m not pretentious but I think it’s true to say that you work with the plate rather than on it. That’s what’s so wonderful about etching – you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. You have an idea how it’ll look when you pull that first proof, but there’s always an element of surprise. The plate, the ground and the etching solution all conspire to give you something you didn’t quite expect. It may not always be a good surprise of course, but that keeps you from complacency.

Yesterday I printed the second and third images in my Red Scar series. I’ve used details of these in the blog header and as my profile picture. They’re soft and hard ground on zinc, with some rather haphazard use of straw hat varnish, etched in copper sulphate solution. The plate area is approximately 15 x 10 cm. Like most of my work, they are illustrative – based on a story about a highwayman. A story destined never to be finished…

It’s been a fair few years since I did any relief printmaking; linocuts of course. These I did after I left art school and no longer had access to an etching press. As the subtlety and variation of marks, tones and textures of etching were what drew me to printmaking in the first place, and really suited my work, I found lino a bit frustrating. I know many artists are able to bring a delicacy and textural quality to this medium, but I just couldn’t. What I produced was so flat and chunky – and downright clumsy – that it just didn’t grab me at all. There followed an eight year hiatus during which I just drew a little and made the odd linocut. Luckily for me and my frustrated inner printmaker, an open access printmaking workshop opened up just down the road from me - and I was away!

Four and a half years of thirst-quenching intaglio printing later, I find that owing to family illness, I can’t get down to the workshop as often as I did. But I have to print, no matter what. Those wood engraving tools that I was given for my birthday over a year ago, and sit untried on the bookshelf, look mighty enticing now…

Wood engraving
What's that all about? I'm an intaglio printmaker by default; etching, drypoint and cardcuts. Personal circumstances, those annoying things that get in the way of one doing what one really wants to do, have all but wrenched the etching needle out of my inky hand and taken away the copper sulphate bath.

After a period of vowing never to print again, here I am, spitsticker in hand, discovering the wonders of end grain boxwood, lemon, pear and maple. Mostly maple because I'm not rich or very good. However, I am hopelessly hooked.