Love of Print

Today I bought a lovely new book in Magma -  ‘Printmaking’ by Paul Coldwell – on my monthly mooch in there. It has fired up the flames of print-passion and reminded me of all the reasons why I’m doing what I’m doing and the plans for the future.

I love print and printing. The smell of the ink and the feel of the paper, the mixing of inks and dyes, the raggedy effects you can make with a bit of turps rubbed on to the plates when doing relief printing and so on.  This doesn’t sound like graphic art water based screen printing though… and it isn’t.  But this book reminded me that we can create printed imagery with more than silkscreens. Flicking through the book, it’s reminded me of how much I love Robert Rauschenberg – he was my hero when at college along with the brilliant Dos Santos who was the king of etching, including making huge public murals etched in limestone….!

So that’s why I’m very happy to be working with artist Gordon Robertson and  representing his print work and designs at TENT London. Gordon is a printer extraordinaire and hugely innovative with his processes and materials. He is a master at etching metal and making jewellery, but all of his work is about surface design. He has been working with shapes on the computer to create designs for porcelain, textiles, jewellery and artwork. We have been meeting up and discussing ways to show his work, and he will be creating some special 3D pieces and art panels that will be completely gorgeous and different, etching into metal to create durable, innovative artworks. I’m delighted to be representing his work, which is so far not actually in existence! I’m keeping his designs under wraps for now to avoid plagarism, but will put work up nearer the time of the show. Here are some examples of work he’s done on jewellery….

It would be fantastic to see some of the massive number of graphic artists utilising other print processes to communicate their ideas beyond silk screening. The potential for it is sexy!