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

Sugar lift

I’ve just started experimenting with sugar lift (Camp Coffee and liquid hard ground) – some interesting results. I like the brushiness of it. Tricky knowing how long to etch for though; I over-etched the shadows on the sisters’ faces as you can see (scary), but some selective burnishing should sort that out. I hope.