I recently visited the Salisbury area and walked around Woodhenge, Durrington Walls and the Cursus which leads down towards Stonehenge. I was struck by how much these large scale traces in the landscape reminded me of the Neolithic stone carvings and the entoptic phenomema. I want to use this idea as a development of combining monotype and carborundum, but aiming to make it my own, removed from Rae.
My initial designs were based around the significance of the sunrise and alignments and imagining carvings illuminated, psychedelically, in their viewers imagination. This then developed into seeing these symbols written across the whole landscape but still glowing.
Clearly the landscape of the sky was also important to prehistoric communities, so I included the Milky Way in my suggested landscape. I have produced a small edition of prints by layering carborundum over a monotype base. My entoptic design was drawn onto an aluminium plate with oil pastel so that the carborundum/pva mix was repelled, leaving soft edges to create glow. The monotype ink was drawn into with solvent and loose ink for the design and spattered for the stars. In the first print, I must have touched this layer inadvertently to create the scratch marks top right. I wanted to add a hint of red or yellow stars to echo the colours in the landscape but my first attempt was heavy handed.
My second attempt was much better.
In this print, I decided to make the sky lighter for greater tonal contrast but I used too much solvent for the stars and the result is less explicit. The paler ink has given the foreground more glow.
The final print has too much solvent in the stars although the effect is to make them look as if they are burning in the sky, reminding me of Van Gogh’s stars. The monotype layer has produced too little glow at the bottom.
Of these 16 landscape prints produced, perhaps five or six are acceptable. I still felt that I hadn’t arrived at my destination with this series, and that the landscapes were still too explicit. I want to explore the opportunities of wiping softly into the ink and creating colour mixes, so I have lost the landscape and enlarged the entoptic shapes. Three monotype layers were rolled with process colours in order to create clean mixes and a rich dark background. I cycled the order in which I printed the layers and this has given each background a slightly different colour cast. These prints have such a wide tonal range that my camera has struggled to record them.
Three ghosts were printed using light Japanese Shirakaba 100gm paper, in order to make the most of the amount of ink remaining on the plates. The ghosts have a soft delicacy on this translucent paper, though the backgrounds do not have the same rich depth.
Printmaking 2 