Print Club News / 13th December 2024
I’ve had a good week this week, tying up a multitude of loose ends that naturally occur at the end of each exhibition or project. A good part of the last week has been taken up packing and delivering the forty pieces of art that we sold at my recent Art for Gaza fundraiser for instance.
It’s been an interesting exercise, and a reminder that these things take a lot of time and energy from initial inception to final paperwork and accounts. We managed to create a show with forty strong pieces of work, many by really well known South West and Bristol artists, and amazingly we sold the whole exhibition at the live auction last Saturday.
Lovely to have the auction opened by ex Bristol mayor George Ferguson, and also amazing to have live performance pieces by Wafa and Badia, who travelled up from London especially, and poet and activist Peter Oswald who recited two amazing new pieces of his own writing at the event.
Peter Oswald > https://www.google.com/search?q=peter+oswald
George Ferguson CBE > https://www.google.com/search?q=George+Ferguson
All that said, it has taken a god deal of energy on top of the mild chaos that had already been created in the studio by my participation in the Battersea AAF, Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair and the RWA Candidates show, all within about six weeks of each other. A lot of moving parts with a lot of ensuing details to resolve.
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I spent a lovely day at Spike Print Studio on Wednesday and completed the next edition for the Print Club. It’s edition #29, a small photopolymer etching with chine collé. It’s been brilliant to continue learning new techniques there this year, which have added to my arsenal of processes, and will allow me to make more hybridised works over the coming years. I’m planning new editions that will combine both digital and traditional techniques and blend them into something distinctly new.
This latest piece, Sennen / EPC / chine collé, takes the original digital drawing, shrinks it down, and turns it into a fairly dark and somewhat moody piece that seems to have it’s own internal energy. I like that about it. The myriad processes on this piece have now become so distanced from my sense of where it originally came from, that it seems to have taken on its own form, at least to my eye.
A few printmakers at Spike stopped to look at it this week, and couldn’t fully understand how it was made, always a good sign that things are becoming more interesting I think.
At the moment the whole edition is drying between some waterproof MDF boards at Spike, so I just need to drop back in midweek, pick the prints up, mount them and post them out to you. All of that should be done by this time next week, all being well.
For 2025 I’m going to recalibrate the way I’m doing things, and focus more on studio time, which has been the clear loser in the rush to exhibit this autumn. As ever I have a long list of pieces I want to make, amongst them an image derived from some small paper trimmings that fell to the floor in the studio here recently, and in so doing created a beautiful, entirely random set of lines which I have photographed, and hope to use as the starting point for a new study. I’m also interested in trying out a quartered piece with gold leaf, that could be quite spiritual I think, and I need to return to my ReVOX etching now that I have, to some extent, mastered the two part chine collé technique.
For interest, the technique I’ve been using, takes the idea of printing the inked plate straight onto the Kozo paper, backed by a dampened sheet of bread and butter paper, which is then peeled away, leaving the Kozo to dry. This gives you an edition of loose prints on the ultra fine Kozo paper that can then be adhered to your choice of holding sheet, in this case Somerset radiant white, as a completely separate task.
The inked Kozo is floated in water face down, becoming a wet transfer sheet, and is picked up on a blank copper plate, trimmed to a hair’s width wider than the image area. As the Kozo floats on the meniscus of the water, it can be precisely aligned with the copper plate before being blotted dry, and having the glue applied with a Hake brush. The edition is then run through the press for a second time, and in so doing allows for near perfect alignment of the chiné collé. The technique also allows for the removal, by scalpel, of any over inked edges.
The whole piece becomes more perfect, more evenly toned, and just generally more more! It probably triples the labour time, but the results are far superior to anything a novice like me could achieve using the more traditional wet on wet technique that I had been struggling with, as the number of wet elements in play at any one time is minimised in favour of more overall control.
As an adjunct, you may like to watch, or perhaps rewatch, this short documentary about Norman Ackroyd RA who recently died. It’s a rather beautiful portrait of a man who has been fully captured by the magic of the etching process, and I think more poignantly, is a study of the solitary life of a solo artist working in print over his whole lifetime. There’s something totally magical about the way he captures light and tone which comes from both his deft eye and a lot of time spent in the studio I suspect. What my friend Andrew, a teacher and sailor, describes as ‘time in the boat’.
It’s on Youtube here > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u94DxOP51M&t=6s
I’ll look forward to sending the edition out next week, hopefully to be followed quite quickly by the circular Diasec pieces I’m producing as edition #30, which are also on my workbench and nearly completed. Don’t hold your breath though, I’ll need a few more days to get them done too…
Best as ever,
Chuck Elliott
If you’d like to receive three exclusive new editions in the post each year, alongside personal news and views from the studio, and invitations to shows and fairs, please do consider becoming a member of my Experimental Print Club. You can join or leave the club at any time, with absolutely no obligation to stay any longer than you want to.
New works are sent out somewhat sporadically throughout the year, often in line with the changing seasons. Each piece is unique, exclusive, and only available on the day it’s editioned, the size of the edition being determined by the number of members on the day.
I hope the club presents a more personal and intriguing way to connect with the studio, by creating a platform for collecting engaging new works for your home. The club is hosted online here, and I send out fairly regular blog posts and emails about the work too. I’d like to think that it’s an interesting proposition!
Membership is currently priced at £36 per month inc. UK delivery, or £42 for an international address.
