Over the past 5 or 6 weeks I’ve been producing work in response to my day trips to Colne and Nelson. In an earlier post I talked about making collages and quick abstract responses with paint and ink which were then photocopied and used as starting points for creating plates.
In my last post about work I referred to some drypoint plates that I had made and printed at Hot Bed Press. I began with 6 plates in response to Colne which were produced quickly; gouging into the plate with the help of a Dremmel and applying loose sections of carborundum for solid areas of black. Below are some photos of the prints from these first plates:
In the past I have only attempted drypoint a couple of times – I liked it but the looser marks weren’t quite suited to the type of work I was making at the time. For this project however it felt right to use a process that is more immediate, changeable and loose. I wanted the plates to reflect my thoughts and reactions to the two towns and the documentation that I had made and something overly planned or laboured wouldn’t have had as much of a connection. It’s also been really useful for me to step away from my rigid style of working and play and experiment with my work. These responses are far removed from my usual practice but it still feels like my work and there are characteristics within the prints that are constant in my style of illustration and image-making.
The composition of each image came from carefully selecting sections of the preliminary collages and piecing together in a way that depicted an element of my time in Colne or the feelings that I had towards the town. It’s difficult to explain how the images work or relate to the Lancashire town but they convey some of the atmosphere or mood that I picked up on. As I mentioned in previous posts I’m interested in folklore and stories relating to the area but also the idea of inventing new folklore and I wanted a sense of magic or mystery to come through in the prints. This wasn’t something that I wanted to force though – some of the images work and some of them don’t.
With each plate the first print picks up the tone of the plate giving a light grey background however I found that after printing once it was easier to wipe the plate back further to give a cleaner print. This gave me the opportunity to control the wiping and leave some shadowy/cloudy looking sections adding to the character of the overall image. On some plates I added further carborundum or more marks after the first print to edit the parts that didn’t quite work. This is something quite new for me with printmaking – in the past I’ve printed and then moved on rather than revisiting an image that I wasn’t sure about.
