ABOUT:

This Summer we celebrate artists who are also printmakers, so we will show some paintings but concentrate on artists original prints.

Prints were first made in the later Renaissance to distribute images of paintings to a larger audience throughout Europe. At that time they were reproductions of existing images rather than works in themselves. Only in Japan at such an early date did artists genuinely make printworks. In the West they were soon collected, and artists realised that there were exciting opportunities available to make prints both more unique and at the same time increase their output and income beyond the geographical confines of their city-state or country. 

Examples include Goya’s Aquatints, Blake’s watercoloured etchings; the Lithographs of Daumier, Chagal, Lautrec and Bonnard; and all of Picasso’s print work, where he truly pushed the print medium to new heights. Current examples include the artists to be shown here: Patrick Caulfield, Paula Rego, Jim Dine and Tom Hammick.

Prints in this country are having something of a renaissance, with the growth of print studios and an explosion of artists working in the medium.

In general terms, there are a few things to look out for when collecting artist prints: the smaller the edition number the better; that the artist has worked with a reputable printmaker/publisher in the making of an image; that the print is printed on good acid free paper, usually with a high cotton content rather than wood pulp, without creases, and supported archivally on acid free boards in a good conservation frame.

Collecting editioned works on paper can be seen as a way of buying a beautiful image by an artist who might already be too expensive to invest in for a one off painting. And many people start off buying prints before they have the confidence to buy a painting. With prints, it is almost a case of the collector sharing the ownership of a picture with a like-minded group of fellow enthusiasts. And many artists make prints not only because they can be a wonderfully liberating medium to  work in, but also because they are consciously making their work accessible to a wider public: Prints are truly democratic.   

In this show we will show silk-screen prints, lithographs and etchings, some of which will be "edition variable" where each print in the edition will vary slightly in colour or some other way. In addition we will show some monoprints, where although part of an edition each one of the series is different because of the addition of collage, paint or other
materials.

As a rough guide, here are some explanations of some of the very varied processes you can see in this exhibition:

Monotypes are unique, one off images, rather than other editioned prints that are made as multiples. A monotype is essentially a drawing on paper made in reverse by painting/drawing on a metal plate, covering the plate in damp paper, and passing them both through a press. The image on the plate is transferred through pressure from the press, from the plate to the paper. Monotypes are fast to make, and the colours can be layered up on each other by adding more ink to the plate each time the image is passed through the press, as long as the plate is successfully re registered at each printing to the same piece of paper. Degas has always been seen as the King of this method of working, and he demonstrates the range of his mark-making prowess using rags, the wooden end of his brush, even his fingers and the back of his hand. Artists often use monotype as a way of leading them into what they will later develop as an editioned etching, woodcut, lithograph or silkscreen, or the use them as compositional tools for large scale paintings and sculptures.

Etching – A generic term for a whole range of processes that use acids with metal plates to create marks that retain ink.

In most of the etchings by Tom Hammick, he has drawn the figurative and essentially representational parts of the image by using the very direct methods of sugar lift or soft ground. With both, he is drawing directly onto the plate. Later on in the process, he uses aquatints on different plates for flat colours.

Occasionally spit bite is used, where pure acids are spread over aquatints to create washes of colour. And he incorporates the method of chine colle in several etchings to add a sort of airy atmosphere to an image, with heightened colour and depth. Further examples of etching:

Hard Ground Etching, a process in which an etching needle is used to draw into hardened wax on a metal plate, without cutting into the metal. The plate is then submerged in acid, which bites into the metal surface only where it has been revealed by the needle. (See the etchings of Rembrandt, Freud, and Picasso’s Vollard Suite as examples.)  The wax is then removed with white spirit or meths, and  ink is wiped over the plate and forced into the etched depressions. The unetched and flat surfaces of the plate are wiped, and an impression is printed under great pressure onto damp paper.

Soft Ground Etching, a much tackier wax covers Soft ground Etching, a method very similar to Hard Ground, but the plate. By laying a sheet of paper over the plate and drawing onto it, the wax is lifted from the plate to the reverse side of the paper where the pressure of the pencil creates a mark on the paper. The resulting line drawing is much more subtle, slightly wider, and a lot of foul biting occurs where wax is removed by the pressure of the hand on the paper. This can create a much less exact drawing but a more tonally sophisticated and atmospheric image.

Aquatint – A form of etching where the plate is covered with fine resin powder or resist, through which acid bites many tiny pockmarks in the metal. If an area is to be completely white, that part of the plate is coated with varnish. The tones produced, when the aquatint is gentle and has a short bite in the acid, can resemble those of a wash drawing, and they can be inked up in coloured inks to create flat colours when the coating of resin is more uniform, and etched deeper. Goya's series of mixed aquatint etchings, Los Caprichos, and his Disasters of War, and his Los Proverbios, are considered supreme example of this technique.

Sugar lift. A wonderfully painterly and fantastically direct medium. Sugar and ink are painted directly onto a plate covered in resin. When dry, and covered in varnish, the plate is covered in boiling water. The heat from the water dissolves the sugar, which lifts away the varnish over it. This reveals the plate and resin underneath. The plate is then put in acid, and through the process, the marks that were initially made in sugar, hold ink. 

Dry Point - (See Gary Goodman's prints) Is an engraving with a strong steel point mashed and dragged over a soft metal plate like copper, aluminium, or zinc. Perspex and card can be used, but the editions are tiny, before the press pressure destroys the readability of the image. The needle used has more of a cutting edge than the rounded point used when upon the etching ground. In drawing the design the needle tears up the copper and leaves what is known as a burr- a ridge of copper on either side of the furrow. It is this burr, which gives the quality to dry-point etchings when they are printed., a beautiful sort of double line that you can see in some of  Picasso’s Vollard Suite. For a large edition, drypoints can be steel faced.

Steel Facing. This is a process when an artist wants to print using genuine uncorrupted colour in the work. Zinc and copper react with the chemicals of many colours, so whites, yellows and blues especially all turn out muddy when wiped off the plate. As colour in these prints is so important, nearly all of Tom’s etchings in this show are made on copper that has been subsequently steel faced before editioning.

Chin Colle, as in Nick Bodimeade "Chair" series.  A paper collage process in which coloured sheets of thin acid free paper are covered in starch glue or wall paper paste and placed over an inked plate. A damp sheet of cotton rag paper is then placed over the top, and the plate and papers are passed through the press as normal. Through the process, the etched ink image is printed on the coloured chin colle paper, which is stuck to the backing sheet by the pressure of the etching press. For great examples of this see Stephen Chambers and Andrejz Jackowski’s prints. (Tom uses this process in many images here.)

Reduction Woodcut. "Stable" and "Horse and Boy" by Tom Hammick are quite a complicated examples of this process. Tom has cut up areas of the ply wood using a jig saw and inked them up separetly. (So far so good, and a master of this simple process is Munch.) The pieces of this print jigsaw were fitted back together and printed onto the paper. Tom had to contain all the pieces of wood in a jig so that registration of the image was as spot on as possible for each subsequent printing. Within each window he cut away an area of the wood, covered it in a new colour of ink and printed it over the last impression. In this way, each cutting reveals the colour that was printed before. So by the end of the process, the wood block has been reduced to the final colour on the print. Excellent examples of this process can be seen in the beautiful linocuts of Picasso, his Bull Fight posters, and Michael Rothenstein’s animal prints.

Lithograph. See "O Vinho" by Paula Rego. Marks are made on a fine-grained zinc plate or limestone using wax crayons, greasy inks and paint. The marks are etched into the plate or stone using a mild solution of nitric acid in gum Arabic. During the printing process, as long as the plate remains slightly wet, inked up rollers distribute ink onto the drawn marks. The water helps repulse the greasy ink from the unblemished areas of the plate or stone. Each colour in a lithograph is made as a separate drawing on a separate plate.

ARTISTS:
Nick Bodimeade Oil on canvas
Gary Goodman Painting
Tom Hammick Etching
Piers Ottey Oil on canvas
Richard Walker Mixed media on canvas
Jim Dine Lithograph
Paula Rego Lithograph
Peter Doig Etching

Giles Penny Painting
Patrick Caulfield Screenprint