Summer has
been and
gone. We've had
one of the wettest summers
ever, and, to
tell the truth, I
feel more
than a
little cheated. Anyway,
enough of that...
Early summer
was taken over
with preparing for a
big party
that we had,
that already seems like years ago,
while the last
couple of months or so
I've been concentrating on making some linocut prints.
The rediscovery of linocut relief printing has been a really exciting journey for me. My original intention was to prepare a couple of simple b/w prints for the Tryk2 exhibition that I'm taking part in, but I've been really taken by the whole working process, and now I'm thinking that linocuts are something I really want to explore and develop.
For a start,
the whole working process itself is
really fascinating. I've been doing '
reduction' linocuts,
where you have just
one linopad, and
you dig out
sections for
each colour. This requires organisation,
planning and
discipline -
qualities I
don't bring to
the studio - but
this also forces
you to
really slow down and
consider composition,
colour, value, line,
etc, in a
way that can be strangely liberating. The technical side
of it is
really interesting as
well, and
I've been helped enourmously by
the sometimes unwitting virtual mentoring of some fantastic artists and
websites,
especially Sherrie York and
Ian Phillips. And I
like the mechanics of it - it
makes me feel like a real '
worker', rather
than farting around with watercolours,
if you know what I
mean...
Anyway,
you can see my efforts on the website. Steep learning curve. Mountains of rejects litter my studio. Below I've uploaded some photos charting the development of a print I've made of some gulls and waders. This was inspired by some visits I made to a place called 'Dueodde' in early August, a sandy beach on the south eastern tip of the island, where the wet weather had created a large lagoon. For a period this was a really popular stopping-off point for multitudes of waders, gulls and terns, many on their way south after breeding in the Arctic, and a really exciting place to see a lot of different birds all together. The three or four times I went during this period, the light was fantastic, and I was taken with the reflections, ripplies, colours - the whole lot really. The way the shadows and light of the gulls' backs created an almost abstract dappled pattern... the moving reflections...
Well, I made
loads of sketches, and
started developing some ideas. Original
sketches included tons
of different waders,
caspian, sandwich, and
common terns, 3
or 4
gulls species (at
one point I
think I had
about 20
different species in
the viewfinder) -but I
reigned in
the inner bird-nerd and
calmed it
down a bit. I
concentrated on the contrast between the gulls and
the oystercatchers, and
sprinkled a
few dunlin in to
create a more
lively composition.On the top
left you can see my efforts to
reduce the amount of colours to
something manageble for a
lino print.
This was really hard, as I
wanted to
keep the differece in
value between reflections,
wings,
etc. This image really helped me out.
It's amazing how much work the eye does as it
seeks to understand
surfaces and
colours, I
think it's called chromatic adaptation...
Anyway,
here are the tools, and
the linopad, as I
was working through it. I
highlight the next stage
of cutting, to
make it
easier. Still made a
few mistakes though...
This next image shows
all the different colours I
printed,
on the left coloumn, and
all the colours on top
of each other as
they appeared on the paper. 7 in
all - far
too complicated. 
