Week three part two - scale

Email correspondence with Steve Edwards - decided to change the stop out I was using to Brunswick Black. Having seen Howard Hodgkin's huge etchings at Alan Cristea's gallery over the summer, and after a conversation with Dolly Thompsett, I decided to try larger sheets of lino, to work with Brunswick Black and to remove myself from the object I was using.

These Howard Hodgkin etchings are of a vast scale - so striking. They are part of a series so the same plates are inked in different colours, often with a coloured wash added afterwards. Each print is made up of 2 to 4 sheets of paper - they must have been printed on a huge press.

I took on board Dolly's suggestion of upping the scale and used four blocks of lino butted together, each 300mm square. I dripped, sponged, scratched the Brunswick Black, added parcel tape, cracked the lino and left it to dry overnight.

4 lino plates butted up together, painted with stop out

two of the plates printed, on the drying rack

New caustic soda recipe: 200ml water, One and a half tbsp wall paper, 2 tbsp caustic soda. (Steve uses 3tbsp caustic soda). I left the sheets for 30 mins. The stop out more or less held - except the sponged areas. The parcel tape worked really well. But the lino became very bowed so didn't ink up well or run through the wood press evenly. But overall the image worked.
I inked up the four plates with relief method, using water based ink. I didn't want to remove the stop out as it contributed to the marks.
I reassembled the four prints to make one large one.

The process of working large, cutting up to small then reassembling, reminds me of the reading Andrew Hewish gave us: The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin by William S. Burroughs; cutting up and rearranging newspaper articles. So I also printed the four plates on top of each other - a further rearrangement of the images.

plates printed on top of each other, wet on wet

Week Three part one - printing

Printed the three lino plates - used relief method and intaglio method. Also combined relief and intaglio on one plate: intaglio first then carefully rolled ink over the top.
Finally printed all three plates ontop of each other, setting up a registration sheet first to make sure they aligned. Too much white showed through so the plates were printed again but first using a blank plate rolled in yellow. (Yellow blank plate, then raw umber mixed with yellow, dark raw umber, black).  Used less extender for successive plates.

relief total plate with acid

relief - 20min staged acid

relief - stop out

Paper was dampened by a spray and placed in the blotters.
Initially used the etching press but the lino slipped and the images were not sharp. Moved on to the wood press which was better.

intaglio on total plate with acid

intaglio on stop out image

intaglio on 20 min staged acid

relief - 3 plates, first plate blank

This three plate image works best for me - the tool is there, just about, like a ghost arising from the mist. It's a memory of the tool, as printmaking could be seen as a memory of the original image - whatever it was.

The other image which I'd like to work on is the 3rd intaglio plate, where a small square remains in the middle. (Plate achieved by etching over the whole thing in one go.) The material and the process start to make the final image.

Danny Rolph said I should look at ghost storis - M.R. James, and artists such as George Raoult- The Judges - apparitions. Also Frottage and Max Ernst, looking at the technicality of their work where the character of the surfaces shows through. I'm keen on Max Ernst's "Grattage" - where the canvas was placed over a texture and paint scraped over it. Chance happenings. I will pursue that in print.