The Reading Room
Artist's statement
So why these? I guess that is part of what you want to know. The answer is both simple and complex as the answers are to most "why" questions.
The simple is because I felt like it. It was fun to spend an afternoon in the studio playing in the ink. I like plants and have spent a fair amount of time on the garden that surrounds our house. I like the spontaneity involved in monoprints—the hope that if this one turns out well, the next one could be even better.
Looking at the images now, I see some familiar themes. I am interested in the entire image, the tensions and flows that animate each composition. These are not subjects in an environment. The subject is the environment, the interplay between the plants and the space that surrounds them, the plants and the ink and paper that surrounded them in the printing process.
Ah, another familiar thread—the influence of the process on the object. The object does not pretend to be the plant—it is a piece of inky paper at the same time that it refers to the plants in the garden.
The third thing I see is beauty. Each fragment of leaf, each seedpod is unique, and the complexity created by the combination and layering of their uniqueness is a mere shadow of the life that existed in the garden that afternoon. The ink and the paper too are beautiful. The ability of this media to hold detail draws the viewer in until you are hovering inches away from the surface and there is still more for your eye to discover.
Technical notes
I made all of these images in a single afternoon. I began with a piece of millboard about 8" x 10", some Daniel Smith Traditional Black relief ink rolled out on an inking slab and plant material I had collected from my back yard (some dried and some fresh). I also had a stack of German Etching, a waterleaf rag etching paper torn to size.
I developed an initial image by rolling up the cardboard with ink then laying plants on top of the ink. I then placed the plate on the bed of my Griffin tabletop etching press, placed the dampened paper on top then the press blankets and sent it through the press. Each subsequent image was worked into the ghost image of the one preceding. Sometimes I inked the plate. Sometimes I inked the plants. Some plants made impressions in the surface of the millboard which continued to print long after they had been removed.
Because German Etching is a waterleaf, I only needed to spray it with water before starting to work on the image. When the plate was ready, I blotted any excess moisture and printed. As the prints were completed I hung them to dry from a line in the studio. This preserved the embossment created by the dampened paper stretching over the plate.
When I scanned these images, I used a Canoscan FB1210U. I chose to scan them in greyscale. The scans thus lose the very subtle colour play that occurs between the cream paper, the black ink and for a few of the prints, the fresh plants being squashed by the press. Can't have everything!
July 2008
To keep up with the times, I modernized the HTML code. Hope you are still enjoying these images.