I've been working on some small monotypes over the past few weeks. I started making these as a quick way to try out palettes and different ways of mark-making on the plate, keeping the size down for economy and to save time. I'm increasingly finding however that I like this size - the largest being no more than about 5" by 4" - especially the concentrated focus and the way in which marks have to be kept simple and graphic to show up. Despite that subtlety in shading is still possible.

I haven't put any of these in  my shop here. I'm not sure how much interest there would be in what are in effect studies. They have been uploaded to flickr however so have a look and if you think they have worth in themselves, please let me know. I would love some feedback.

I've included some examples below, but the full set, currently eight in number but with another half dozen or so still to scan, can be found here.

Some of the prints still to scan were made while trying to get out of my creative block that I posted about a few days ago. I'll put them into a separate post that will tie into the series of posts on 'appropriation' that I started here.

In order to set up my new press I did a series of test prints with some old plates.

An original print made on the presses at college is shown first.

These two are made on my own press.

I made a series of test prints also from a plate made on a solar etching course. Each one was made with varying levels of ink, wiping and pressure. It would have been better I suppose to use the same colour but by the time I realised that it was too late. The one shown is the best of the set. The others are on Flickr here

Most of the limited amount of work I've been able to do over the last month has been focussed on ideas developing from Neolithic rock art. I touched on this at the beginning of my abortive screen print series. As I said, this art appears to be abstract. Having been thinking about this in the interim, I am coming to the conclusion that while these carvings appear to show abstract symbols, it is more likely that they are part of a symbolic visual language that we can no longer access.

The typical placing of these carvings in a wider landscape setting suggests to me that the relationship with the landscape had some meaning. One possibility is that they are an attempt at mapping the relationship between the people who carved them and the wider world. Another is that they relate to some sort of spirit world and had some sort of ritual significance. A third is that they relate to significant events or people in the  history of the tribe.

Whatever meaning they had is of course lost to us. Our response, our relationship to these symbols can only be from our perspective. Despite that they seem to tap into our subconscious in some way, so that we are driven to seek meaning in these elemental symbols of dot, line and spiral.

This is I think going to be the focus for my work for quite a while. In some ways I was already going that way as the images in the linked post above testify.

The work I am planning will I think involve taking the shapes and forms from the rock carvings and placing them in or over grounds derived from landscape. I have a few sketches and ideas and will be working on these over the next few weeks.

For example this, which combines 'interpretive' sketches of the rock art symbols with a landscape photograph:

Watch this space...

I finished the last post on this subject with a link to a flickr slide show of my pastel sketches.

The next step in the process was to try some digital manipulation of these sketches to see how they might be used. At the time I only had the vaguest idea of print medium I would eventually be using, so I tried several options, sometimes combining the sketches with landscape photographs, sometimes combining more than one sketch. Because the original rock carvings are set in such a dramatic landscape, I was particularly keen to get some sort of landscape 'feel' to the prints.

I ended up with about a dozen digital sketches, included in the flickr slideshow above. Some of these might well work as prints in their own right, but I'm not sure that they work as 'rock art' images. For most of them the shapes and patterns have become simply a basis for more elaborate workings of the basic forms. Some kept a landscape feel, and I may well come back to them, but for the first screen print I selected this one to be used as a starting point.

I called this one 'figure study' - the shapes and curves of the two pastel sketches when combined suggesting multiple renderings of a female figure.

To turn this into a screen print would require several stencils - I thought at least 6 or 7. I started therefore by trying to reduce the image to a series of discrete layers by tracing the outline of the digital print and then inking in the shapes. The inked drawing was then used to create a screen with photo emulsion.

For various reasons, this approach was not very successful. Some of these were down to my indifferent technique, but a significant problem was that the large area of colour to my eye was simply too flat. I attempted to introduce some variation by using different shades of ink, but nothing seemed to work.

Looking at the digital print, it is possible to see a line texture underlying the rest of the image. I created this by drawing lines on tracing paper while resting on a rough surface and without paying too much attention to accurate spacing or alignment. I scanned this in and made a screen from it.

It doesn't look much here but it printed very well in a warm coppery brown colour. It was still too even though, so I decided to break it up digitally.

Seeing how well this worked, I decided to 'distress' the scanned versions images I had created by hand with indian ink in a similar fashion. You can see the effect in the two images below

Plain image

Layer image digitally 'distressed'

I'll come back to how this was done another time, but the effect when printed was much more subtle that the slabs of even colour created by the first version.

So, this is where I am up to now.

Base layer - 'broken up' line texture

Layer two - based on a rust texture

Layer three - variations on the base layer in another colour and rotated about 180°.

I'll scan in a copy of the print so far and pick up the story in a later post.