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Abstract Inspiration Landscape Natural Printmakers

Sue Lowe

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website: http://www.somersetprintmakers.co.uk/Sue_Lowe.html

Sue’s work draws on the landscape of west Somerset. Her imagery sits on the borderline between landscape and abstract. The work is concerned with textures and surfaces and draws inspiration from the lines and patterns found in the landscape that tell stories of formation, growth, erosion and decay. Sue has developed a range of collagraph techniques that allow her to use found organic and recycled materials to create richly-textured prints. She also makes extensive use of chine colle.

Many of her images are layered in horizontal strips and represent the seasons and landscape elements. They have a unity of colour and delicacy that I like.

Sue received a fine art degree in 2004 from the University for the Creative Arts at Farnham. Since graduating she has combined development of a printmaking practice with teaching in adult education and a career in arts administration. Sue exhibited regularly in galleries and art fairs in London and the South East before moving to Somerset, (where she was born and grew up), in Spring 2011.

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Inspiration Landscape Media Natural Printmakers Woodcut

Helen Brown

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“I work directly from the landscape in either lino or woodcut. Working outdoors enables me to capture the line and fluidity of scenes and localities.

My landscapes are landscapes of self-possession and movement. Through their layered and textured forms they express the tectonic flow of the earth, as mountains and valleys rise and fall in an experience of time much more immense than our own.

I spend time in the places my work depicts, returning to them. From the Sussex Downs to the foothills of the Himalayas, my prints are imbued with the emotion of place. Each one of my pieces is given individual life though colour and chine colle (paper overlay) or hand tinting, just as the mood of a scene shifts with light, time and experience.

My work takes shape in the place between landscape and dreamscape. Whether in architectural or animal forms, it connects the experiential world to the imagination, the material to the emotional.

Our thoughts and feelings colour the things we encounter, and they in turn colour us. In my prints I give visual expression to this conversation.”

See page on Art of Illustration

Biography

Helen Brown grew up in Cambridge and did an Art Foundation course there then an art degree at Brighton. She learned screen printing, etching and linocut.

Techniques

While in Brighton she started to focus on linocut because she could do observational prints outdoors :

“I went to Devil’s Dyke, just outside Brighton and cut the block while sitting outside the pub. They gave me free food and loads of people asked what I was doing. The print worked very well, and people bought it. I thought I would follow this path for a while because I enjoyed it, and it worked well with my travelling.”

“I like the stages; you make the block and then there is the never-ending choice of how to print it. I might print the block in ten different colours. I really like chine colle, where I use coloured papers that I have cut up beforehand. This technique I have taken to extremes.”

“I have recently been thinking more about the marks, so I feel very inspired with my work.I made a lot of blocks from my last trip to Guatemala, which I print to have a bright, strong colour blend, like their dyed and woven fabrics. The landscape in Guatemala is quite unreal, so using unrealistic colours would not seem right. That is what is good about printmaking: I can print the blocks and it might look great, or not, but I can easily change the way I print it.”

The  prints are individually made by the artist in tranches of a few prints – the edition is not all printed at once.

See profile in D’Arcy and Vernon-Morris pp223-225

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Abstraction Chiaroscuro Etching Inspiration Landscape Lithograph Media Monoprint Natural Portrait Self-portrait

Edgar Degas

Edgar Degas has been influential in my work for:

Degas produced many prints as well as paintings, and often worked in pastels over prints.

Lithographs

He produced lithographs from some of his paintings – some of these have a beautiful dreamy quality, benefiting from a monochrome treatment to enhance the total contrasts.

Degas After the Bath 1891–92 Lithograph, transfer, and crayon on laid paper; fifth (final) state
Degas After the Bath 1891–92 Lithograph, transfer, and crayon on laid paper; fifth (final) state
Degas La-Chanteuse-1888-89 lithograph

Etching

His etching uses a range of styles, often based on drawings of intimate scenes that have a . In ‘The laundress’ his energetic lines echo the frenzy of work in the laundry, and the ink tone on the plate conveys the steam and mist. His ‘whorehouse scenes’, some based on monoprints have an immediacy and poignancy not found in his painting.

Degas The laundress, 1879-80. Etching on copper plate.
Degas The laundress, 1879-80. Etching on copper plate.
Degas Whorehouse scene 'The drunk prostitutes'
Degas Whorehouse scene ‘The drunk prostitutes’

Monoprints

Degas (1834-1917) took up monotype printing in 1874-75. In his lifetime Degas produced more than 250 subjects and 400 separate impressions in monotype, far exceeding his etchings or lithographs. He used ghost prints as a basis for pastels. Between 1876-1881 nearly 70% of his works in colour were monoprints enhanced with pastel, sometimes drawing with them, sometimes wetting them for watercolour effects to give different moods, and to add and take away figures.

Degas Le Sommeil c 1885 Courtesy of British Museum
Degas Le Sommeil c 1885 Courtesy of British Museum

Degas found monotype gave him greater freedom to improvise and be spontaneous than drawing on paper allowed. The ability to wipe and smear ink on the plate, and the darkness of tone from the ink, allow a range of mark=making and tone very difficult to achieve with charcoal. It was ideal for capturing secret and intimate scenes, such as women engaged in their toilet or in brothel scenes. He was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints and was interested in the ways shapes and lines can be organised on paper to indicate figures in movement. From 1870s he started to have problems with his eyesight, so he was more sensitive to light/dark contrasts and created dramatic chiaroscuro effects.

He was introduced to the process by his friend the amateur etcher Vicomte Ludovic Napoléon Lepic (1839-1889).  Lepic enjoyed experimenting tonal wiping (l’eau forte mobile or variable etching) to create many variations on a basic landscape composition. He used one etched plate and  wiped off this plate, and also ‘retroussage’,  a way of adding ink to previously wiped plates to produce much richer tones on the prints.

Degas adopted this  ‘dark-field’ method. He covered the entire surface of the printing plate in oily, slow-drying ink and then removed it as necessary to create the image. He scratched and brushed it, wiped it with a rag and manipulated it with his fingers to create the composition, before fixing it by printing it onto paper. He worked and reworked his plates, wiping off and adding ink with rags, fingers and brushes. Later he began to draw on the plate with Indian ink, often diluting it with turpentine and working directly on the plate with a paintbrush.

Degas usually printed two impressions of each monotype subject, one strong, the other weak. He would keep untouched the first impressions (this is a first impression), but he would rework the second with pastel or gouache.

A Strange New Beauty: Monoprint Landscapes

His monoprint landscapes, included in a MoMA exhibition in 2016, are particularly beautiful and innovative. These use oil based ink and solvents to produce misty effects with strong abstraction.

 

Edgar Degas, Factory Smoke, 1877–79, monotype on paper, 4¾ x 6¼ inches

Sources

Hauptman, J. (2016). Degas: A Strange New Beauty, New York: MoMA.

Google images for Degas chiaroscuro

Degas Creative Commons site for paintings only.