Artist journal 27.03.22

The supper of champignons

It’s not really a breakfast of champignons this morning, more of a supper, as I’m very late. It’s my husband’s birthday, and the date of the annual shifting of time about, and thus the very worst day for Mother’s Day. I celebrated by cleaning out my sons nature pond, which had become very murky due to something pushing the plant pots over, which meant you couldn’t see the frogspawn I rescued from a drying puddle in the woods. It seems OK, but I’m not sure how you tell if frogspawn is  OK. Any good mother will be spending their special morning sifting through goopy eggs to ensure the happiness on their frog loving offspring, I’m sure.

Here’s a beetle I made three ways. The first row is my favourite, the aluminium etching. I made it using Baldwin intaglio ground (BIG) and copper sulphate. I’m also fond of the second row, a tetrapak drypoint. I liked the way you could carve easily into the Tetra Pak and it was easy to wipe clean, and the colours stay bright. It’s limited by its small size (this is a tofu carton) and the surface is very slippery to engrave, and can peel up on the steep corners of the zig zag. The third is a Perspex drypoint, which I hated doing. Even with an engraver, drawing onto Perspex is not for me. It’s too slippery and hard to make a good surface for the ink to stick onto.

Having decided on the aluminium etching, made this:

It’s a long way from where I want it to be, possibly because I went from a very simple image to a quite complex one.

I made the galaxies by monoprinting on to sumi paper, which was, it turned out, completely unsuitable to chine colle. It hated the glue and wrinkles and ripped and dissolved, and my favourite galaxy simply moved out of place. I also think the etching would print better on a different paper. There are so many variables - ink, pressure, paper, dampness- you have to be quite scientific about it, which takes time. BI will proceed with further experiments soon, and even if it’s a flop I’ve already learn masses from it, and is anything really a failure if you’ve learnt?

Here’s a little owl I got for Mother’s Day. It came from the Weston library in Oxford, whose exhibitions are always worth a look if you like massive manuscripts clad in gilt. Apparently it’s modelled from an owl in a medieval bestiary housed in the Bodlian, but the sculptor has fixed a few flaws in its appearance. I’m very fond of these little cast animals you find in souvenir shops, I’d like a crow and a fox and such but it’s impossible to know what search term to use to find them online. Most excitingly, they had an Albion letterpress printing press you were allowed to have a go on, always worth a visit.