Prints
The Water's Edge	Prints	Jacob's Ladder
Printmaking, creating within the print workshop, without preconceived images, in a non-mimetic way, is a stimulating blend of the hap or chance and the deliberate. From the setting down of a mark to its proofing and then editioning, the process is long and time consuming. However, I find that the considerable time involved is also a great advantage. From stage to stage in the printmaking process, and I find myself thinking in two ways quite different to the thought process involved in painting in oil. First, what one makes is created out of deliberate layers, layers that are deliberately planned, but ones in which chance offerings are as likely to appear as spoils. In the layering process, one layer may both conceal the previous layer – depending on the degree of overlay or relative opacity of the pigment – and also reveal new combinations of colour, unexpected effects. It is a medium that constantly disappoints and delights. Besides the time between the creation of a mark and its setting down through the screen onto paper, there is the second difference, the space involved. The mark eventually printed is what one has drawn, but it has changed, evolved, become more generalised, in a way it has been rationalised by the film transfer, the mesh of the screen and the very thickness of the pigment. It is different. A different expression to the one from which it has originated. And that difference too, that distance, can also be stimulating. It is as if one has been offered an additional perspective. In some of these prints I was excited by the sheer plasticity of the medium, by the thickness and near-impasto effects of the paint. In others I worked with primary colours in a liquid wash that allows the white of the paper to inform the colour. In every print, at some stage in the proofing, tangents, new paths, new ideas were offered and taken and the ideas evolved as the stages of printmaking occurred. Even though the passions one sets down in images are long in the making, the tension and choices of the process are peculiarly nourishing.