May 2022 - 'Grey Dead Concrete' | Intaglio Experiments (Xcut Xpress)

New work - ‘Grey Dead Concrete’

I spent most of May working hard to complete this 42x42cm stippled artwork entitled ‘Grey Dead Concrete’.

‘Grey Dead Concrete’, 2022, 42x42cm ink, acrylic and watercolour pencil on paper.

It hurt like hell, especially the final 18 hours of stippling over two days, but I think it was all worth it. The subject is a Red Deadnettle in flower, poking through a cracked concrete track. It reminds me of the Ben E. King track Spanish Harlem and I suppose it is loosely complimentary to the idea that you can find beauty in unpromising places. Apart from depicting the evident power that many plants and fungi have over human structures (Pavement Mushrooms are well-known to push their fruits up through solid concrete and asphalt) this drawing was actually about my personal journey into foraging. This is a plant that most people will have seen if they spent time walking outside city centres but it was only in the past year that I became aware of it being edible and actually quite a nice thing to nibble on. Not a showstopper but if you pluck the top few leaves and the flowers early on a sunny morning then you have a slightly sweet simple garnish with the added bonus of beautiful little flowers.

Detail from ‘Grey Dead Concrete’, 2022.

The artwork took roughly 80 hours in total. I stippled the entire scene before adding a base of watercolour pencil to the plant, and then clarified its shape and tones with acrylics to get the desired contrasts.

Intaglio Experiments (Xcut Xpress)

After much umming and ahing I finally managed to snap up an Xcut Xpress die-cutting machine on eBay. I don’t really have any spare money at the moment but I couldn’t resist dipping into savings for this £90 purchase. You see, they have become cult objects because they also excel as portable printing presses. It looks like a sandwich press but folds out into a decent solid bed. The metal roller wheel is adjustable so you can apply the perfect amount of pressure as you crank the hefty plastic print bed through.

After purchasing some compressed printing felt and some newsprint I returned to Tetrapak printing. I have been etching the foil cartons and inking with Akua Intaglio inks. Wetted Fabriano paper seems to do the trick so far. My first subjects were charismatic Romney Marsh churches; St Thomas a Beckett at Fairfield, and St Augustine’s at Brookland.

‘Church of St Augustine, Brookland’, 2022, intaglio from Tetrapak (orange juice carton).

Small pieces at around 10x17cm but I was more than happy with the results of this cheap and fairly ethical method of printing. After all - Tetrapak cartons are almost un-recyclable in the UK so anything that provides them with a valuable second life is a huge plus. That said, I have also bought some new lino to play with so as ever my eco-credentials aren’t entirely squeaky clean.

‘Thomas a Beckett, Fairfield’ [top], ‘Church of St Augustine, Brookland’ [bottom], intaglio on orange juice Tetrapak carton.

Looks to me like they have a lot of promise. I will learn a lot from this new toy!

There are three prints of each of these so far. Available (cheaply) for sale.

That’s all for now. I have plenty of potential projects on the go but all are in my mind at the moment. Hopefully June will yield some interesting new results.

September 2021 - New artwork 'Aesop, thwarted' | Experimentation - Tetra Pak

Many artists suffered from a creative drought during the deepest weird of the pandemic but I seemed merrily aloof from it and just kept creating. This summer though I felt completely drained of creativity despite wanting to work every day. I carry the lingering sense of loss from lockdown version one in 2020. I deeply miss the revealed vision of what a re-ordered and world could be like. Seeing everything slotting thoughtlessly back into the same tired grooves as before seems like some sort of coping mechanism for society but I pine for the missed opportunity. Quieter roads and improved sleep, the lack of road soot on the windowsill, seeing people enjoying the outdoors when and where they never did before, learning the names of things and foraging, being able to just stop and reconsider things for a bit, and to treasure being alive instead of fretting at being unable to inflate a car tyre because of an enormous petrol station queue.

A few weeks ago I felt the volcano of creativity coming back as the annual summer holiday tourist crowds stopped scaring me off the streets, and then suddenly I could make new work again.

New artwork - ‘Aesop thwarted’

This piece is taken from a real-life view in St Leonards-on-Sea. It sparked some meandering thoughts and I was perfectly poised to make this the work that drew me out of that desert. If you want to read a little more about it then it can be found here. I always intended to use watercolour pencil over the stippling for this work because the glow of the mossy branch is just too lovely to leave monochrome. Along with my other work ‘A housing crisis’, from last year, I think there is a time and a place for setting aside my assertion that people’s brains colourise a monochrome scene automatically. I like the idea that humans ‘see’ colour even when there isn’t any, like supposedly seeing edges to objects in reality - can you ever actually draw the outline of a tree or can you only just suggest its form? The hyper-natural colour of mosses in a built environment now sometimes leave me unable to resist. The atomisation of the form in this series of work continues as I remove all the drawn lines, and I’m not too fussy about colour bleed on plant drawings either as it reminds me of movement. I’m working towards depicting a sense of things.

Experimentation - Tetra Pak

I recently heard that you could cut open Tetra Pak containers and use them for printing. Having fought a lot of internal battles over sustainability and waste I was getting super-frustrated with discoveries that the local council was no longer taking this kind of packaging for recycling, despite it being one of the best ways of cutting back on my dairy consumption and the only way of getting certain legumes. Hearing that printing might give the waste a second use was intriguing. There are lots of tutorials available online, but basically you etch the foil surface with a metal point and ink the ‘plate’ before pressing it. I’ve got a long way to go before I get the results I want but here are some examples of hand-pressed plates on my first attempts.

An inked plate depicting my work ‘Fang’ from earlier this year.

Lots wrong with this but a fascinating start.

A better result that taught me a lot about the wetness of the paper and the inking method.

That’s all for now, I need to try and make some new work today. Fingers crossed.