Thursday 11 March 2010

another illusion

... of a seascape.

Freire, WIP, monotype, 24x50cm on Tosa Shi paper


other than the water to clean my printing tools with, there hasn't been any water in sight of my artmaking over the last months. i am busily working away on another round through fields in the landscape. chilean ones, this time. while the main project is in a lemon yellow/orange/cyan palette, i wanted a counterpart to be much more sombre, autumn-haze like. and oops, it looks i ended up with something else altogether.

the print is a build of two layers of raw umber, one dark purple grey and a light blue grey on top. they are markings with a knife on an inked up sheet of perspex. much of the effect is in fact due of the paper - it's a very fibrous japanese paper with a lot of the inking sinking into it. so while the top layers where in fact rather light and opaque, they sunk into the previous (still wet) umber layers and neutralised the value contrast considerably.

there's a lino layer to go on top as in this one here, but i think i will leave this one print as it is - the illusion of a seascape at night.

this is the end of this particular printing project and i have written up some more on the process here, if you are interested

4 comments:

Jeanette Jobson said...

The illusion works very well Gesa.

I like the cool greys and shots of silver running through, hitting high points of what would be land with the grey sea sitting between.

If you hadn't explained its history, I would have read it as sea and land. I still do.

vivien said...

interesting - I too read it as the sea :>)

Gesa said...

thank you, both. yes, i like the ambiguity of the palette and marks. much of what is the end result is really due to the paper: so much of the light tones have sunk into it and got neutralised much closer to the raw umber than it was on the inking plate. the photo is really poor though, my apologies; i tried to correct but without much success: the palette and the paper surface elude capturing with my photo skills :|

Africantapestry and Myfrenchkitchen said...

I "oops" very often Gesa..and they are sometimes the good ones! And like the other comments..I also initially thought it was a great seasacpe!
Ronell