Influences 5 - Freya Payne

At 36 ~ Freya Payne, etching, 2005

I wasn't yet etching when I first came across Freya Payne's work in Printmaking Today in 2006. I was getting some pretty good tone and texture with card cuts but there isn't that versatility of being able to rework and rework and rework the plate like there is with etching. It wasn't until 2009 that I began to use pine resin aquatints to attempt to achieve really tonal / textural effects with etching. And now, five years later, I still can't achieve anything like what Payne does with the plate.

Amateur ~ Freya Payne, 2007

I like portraiture and it remains integral to my work, but I guess my main focus is narrative. Some of Payne's earlier etchings have narrative themes. I particularly like the image below - rather Rego / Hanselaaresque.

Looking for exits - Freya Payne, 1998

In an interview with Katherine Jones (Printmaking Today, Summer 2006), Payne is asked what it is about printmaking that interests her. She replies:

'I love both the physical process and the extended possibilities of a way to draw. The stopping and starting, the slow alchemy of acids and metals; the way drawing becomes an accruing of marks, layer by layer, on a surface physical enough to handle so much alteration, but which still gives an image which feels complete - the journey of the making unified in the final image.

The prints are often testing grounds for installation or sculpture and get fed back into prints as props. The boundaries between what leads the work - concept or process - blur.'

Sisyphus ~ Freya Payne, 2007

On the subject of process, Payne says this:

'When all else is in flux, printmaking gives you somewhere to begin, some parameters, technical anchors. It also gives you a valuable space between the act of making and seeing the result. Often I have very black periods when I lose faith in what I'm doing; this space can be a life raft.' 

How true this is. I've lost count of the times when I've become stuck with an image and found... comfort? Reassurance? New momentum? Simply by cleaning up the plate, degreasing, adding an aquatint and beginning to stop out. All begins to flow again. And the ritual of preparing a new plate when the image isn't fully formed in the mind - the process of filing down the edges, taping the back, degreasing and applying that first hard ground - then the image is ready to trickle onto the plate. I wonder if it's the same for painters preparing a canvas or sculptors doing whatever needs to be done to their chosen medium. I'd be interested to know.

To Turn Again ~ Freya Payne, 2007

Women ~ Freya Payne, 2008

The joys of teaching

It’s all go art-wise at the moment with teaching, two exhibitions coming up and an etching workshop with master printmaker Andrew Baldwin, he of the BIG etching ground, next weekend.

My recent teaching was fun. I taught a group of experienced etchers how to use pine resin (otherwise known as rosin, colophony or Greek Pitch – splendid name!) as an aquatint; a first for me and the workshop.

It made me think particularly about the difference between teaching beginners and experienced printmakers. There’s a lot more process with beginners whereas with those who are coming to a technique with some experience already, it’s much more about the image; critiquing and problem-solving the composition etc. Both are fun and challenging but require different skills I think.

The course was fully booked and went very well, despite a slightly tense start to the day. The power went off half an hour before everyone was due to arrive but it was just a switch tripped fortunately. My students produced some interesting images and certainly kept me on my toes all day; felt quite pooped when I got home! In a good way of course. I love teaching.

Images:
top - Beatrice Caniggia, pine resin and drypoint print
bottom - Ruth Barratt-Danes, pine resin and drypoint print

All kinds of dust

Day four of building mayhem (oh the dust…!) and I’m actually getting a lot more done in the studio than I thought I would, experimenting further with pine resin as an aquatint. My first efforts, in I which I used it with sugar lift, were interesting - if you want the subjects of yr portraits to look as though they’re recovering from a hideous accident - but weren’t really what I was after (see the example below – and that was AFTER cosmetic surgery…). I’m not entirely sure what was happening here; it may have been that the water to melt the sugar was too hot, or that the liquid hard ground just didn’t agree with the pine resin. The ground lifted off in unsubtle blobs which was too uneven for what I’m trying to achieve.

Having abandoned the sugar lift, I am now just stopping out areas with the liquid hard ground – with much better results (see above and below). It’s easy to get in a tangle here because it means painting out the white areas with a dark liquid, but then, printmakers are used to doing things backwards anyway!

The wonders of pine resin

Here’s my first experiment using pine resin as an aquatint. It’s too dark at the moment but I was quite pleased with it for a first attempt. I ground the powder from quite large lumps using a somewhat crude mortar and pestle, if you can call it that. Can’t remember what beach the stone came from but it was most probably Welsh.

The texture of the aquatinted area is uneven and rather crazed in places which may be because I’ve not put enough resin on or because the powder isn’t fine enough. This is something I’ll be able to experiment with to get different textures and tones. I’m not a huge fan of even tone in my own work; I quite like a bit of chaotic texture and foul biting going on, so I think this rather basic method of grinding my own powder and dusting it on using an old pair of tights is going to suit me rather well.

Now, where’s my burnisher…