I’m feeling a strong pull back to the blackness of my uni works. A desire to create rich, velvety,disturbing black masses again. I keep returning in thought to the aims of my etchings at that time and how I might achieve them now, need to devote more time.
This print is from the time when my intentions for my work first began to fall into place, a coalescence of subject and technique. Made at the commencement of second year uni it is the earliest work that will appear on this site, a starting point for all that’s followed.
Plates so small you can see the grain of the aquatint. Under exposure mechanically produced, forcing our eyes to adjust. My home amongst the murky depths.
Filed under: 2005, made in, printmaking | Tags: bonbeach, lino cut, printmaking
The beach on cold, windy days, inhospitable, the clouds pour over, a curtain of darkness. Today reminded me of this little picture from long ago, the suburbs I live in at their best. I experience them alone on days like these, too cold for the dog walkers, I face the wind coming off the water, look inland, heading home to peppermint tea and woolen socks.
Filed under: 2005, made in, printmaking | Tags: edithvale wetlands, etching, printmaking
The edithvale wetlands a suburban anomaly, bisected by tarmac the grass cranes over in a fruitless attempt to engulf the foreign divider. It can be nice to step away from swamps of tonality to the crisp etched line of a hard-ground.
Filed under: 2005, made in, 2006, made in, printmaking | Tags: lithography, printmaking
Lithography, a process that is beautiful in its use of science. Working with repulsion a slab of limestone is treated to create distinct oil and water accepting areas. In the case of these images an area of the stone is inked to be painstakingly scraped back with razor and scalpel exposing the hydrophilic stone, creating the whites. A technique that wrecked havoc on my wrists, I only pursued it a short while as the finished result never compared to the embedding of ink into paper fibres that etching achieves.
Filed under: 2005, made in, book binding, drawing | Tags: artist book, drawing, graphite
At the end of 2005 my landscapes turned from the picturesque to the sublime. I became enthralled in the shadows of the suburbs and the forms that populated them. It was the beginning of my exploration of the void as an aesthetic and conceptual device. Initially restrained and crisp my blacks latter swamped the page bleeding out at the edges.
Filed under: 2005, made in, printmaking | Tags: chelsea heights, etching, landscape, printmaking
These etchings are a series I made in 2005. I can not emphasis enough that these pictures are not about horses just as my header is not. There is much more to be considered such as the interplay between the geometric and the textural and the boundaries between suburbia, industry and the australian outback. These images also set me off on a journey into the black void and it’s place in suburbia which captivated me for a year and a half. The top image is one that years latter I still go back to in an attempt to understand what it is I wish to achieve.
