‘The horror! The horror!’*

In The Soldier’s Tale, the Devil assumes several disguises in order to conceal his true identity from Joseph. He goes ‘en travesti’, complete with the skirts and headscarves of a Pedlar Woman, and for me this provided the most fun when it came to producing a maquette. A few weeks ago I made a small one of the complete figure…

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… and yesterday completes a larger version of the head, shoulders and hands for close-ups. I had a last-minute notion to offer the audience… though not Joseph the Soldier… a subliminal flash of what lies under the Devil’s disguise, and what we see is not comforting!

The-Devil-as-a-Pedlar-Woman taking shape on my work-table.

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The claws are quite scary….

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… as is his/her face…

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…though beneath the disguise…

… lurks even worse!

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* Quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

up in ‘the battery’…

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… the floor is littered with drying book-plates for Marly Youman’s Thaliad, awaiting only a trimming. (The air at Ty Isaf is ripe with the smell of oil-based printing-ink and white spirit.) These were promised over at Phoenicia Publishing to the first fifty purchasers of the book, and I regret to report that I’ve been unforgivably tardy over getting the job done. Still, they’ll be off next week. I’ll send all the ones for recipients in the US to Marly or Beth for re-posting, but shall forward the UK bookplates directly. Apologies to everyone for my slowness with this. I’ve been away in the Land of the Mari!

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Above: trying out  a print made on coloured paper in another Marly Youmans book, The Foliate Head. The turquoise looks pleasingly jazzy against the red endpapers. I’ll cut a rubber-stamp for my name, as I think the chunkiness of the relief print needs bold lettering for ‘Hicks-Jenkins’ in the space at the bottom. And as I’ll be using this plate in many of my books, a stamp will move things along a bit.

the bookplate

Detail of the finished print.

A lino-print in progress is a living thing. No matter how carefully I’ve planned a block, once underway things shift to create unexpected effects and unplanned moods. Sometimes the result is so far from the concept that I have to undergo a mental readjustment to allow for the transformation twixt idea and realisation, yet to step back from this creative flux would be to hold fast to sterile facsimile and absence of sparkle.

The first tiny, scrappy  sketch.

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Second stage: a cut-out.

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The penultimate stage of design, made as a collage, had a jaunty bird, plump, confident and joyful, his head raised in song. In the finished print the little fellow seems far more vulnerable, his head smaller, his body frailer and his eye wide with what might be alarm. But he is what he is, and I can’t bring myself to reject him, even though he is not what I expected. Marly’s text is all about the vulnerable cast upon the choppy seas of a changed world, and if my bookplate is more in the spirit of what she created than I planned, then I accept that my subconscious knew better than my conscious mind what was needed for the job.

With the finished bookplate in place, the little bird serenades my frontispiece portrait of Thalia.

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A collage, made to ‘visualise’ how the print might look..

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My desk scattered with the detritus of lino-cutting. Here the final design has been drawn to scale.

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A reversed scale drawing is transferred via carbon paper to the lino, and the cutting begins. I rub Conté pencil into the surface of the block as I go, to get a better impression of how the contrast between ink and paper will appear in the finished print.

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‘Frottage’… rubbing Conté pencil across a sheet of thin paper laid over the block… allows me to judge how the emerging shapes are looking. By holding the paper to the light and looking at the reverse side, I can see how the finished positive  image will appear.

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The finished block awaiting ink and a first proof.

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The first proof.

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Tomorrow I’ll undertake a little cutting back and cleaning up of the background before I start editioning, but that apart, this is pretty much how the bookplate will appear. It measures 15 x 10.5 cm.

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lino worked with an etching needle

Conté drawing for a foliate head.

A conversation with Marja-Leena in yesterday’s comment boxes had me rootling in my archive for the blocks and prints I made nearly a decade ago in the lead-up to what was to have been an illustrated edition of Henry Vaughan poems. The prints shown were experiments, proofs that I’d intended to have another attempt at. They have their shortcomings, but nevertheless there are qualities in them that please.

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This ghostly first proof is a bare 8 cm square, which shows how delicate the scratching technique can be. I didn’t invent the technique of printing light over dark, but stole it from Picasso (always steal from the best) though he printed over black with a densely opaque white that made his images look like bold black prints on white paper. I wanted a silvery, twilight quality to the decorations for the Vaughan poems. I should have proofed this print again, but instead I cut another block.

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The second attempt at cutting a block for the image…

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… and the only print made from it.

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I have a large notebook crammed with drawings and experiments made for this project, and a box-file of the lino-blocks.

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One day I must take the things I learned at that time and turn them into something with a purpose. Perhaps not the Vaughan, and not even the iconography of birds and foliate heads I was planning as decorations for his poems. But those ghostly heads at the top of this post rather haunt me, and the chill, moonlit spider-web of scratching conjuring them is a technique that might well serve another book project. It has a pleasingly strange quality, as the only finished image for the book-that-never-was illustrates.

it’s official…

…I’m an idiot! Spot the error!!!

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My friend Lesley has just left a message in the comment box below. She wrote:

‘Clive, am I being dim? Shouldn’t the lettering be cut in reverse to print, or are you yet to cut your master block? ‘

Lesley, you are not being dim, though I clearly need a brain transplant. Yes, I’ve been cutting away at a positive rather than a negative image, and moreover so happy was I slicing away with my newly-sharpened gouges that I would have continued until I’d finished had you not drawn it to my attention. If this was a play on a stage, I’d have just taken a stupendous pratfall! Just as well this is a small block and I can get going again quickly. Thanks my friend for pointing it out. Much obliged.

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ben and the thaliad risograph

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In recent years many artists have increasingly relied on ‘giclee’, a high quality ink-jet printing process, to reproduce original paintings as affordable artworks. I’ve never felt at all inclined to market my work in this form, because while I acknowledge that the process can reproduce an image to a high standard, for me a print should aspire to be more than a basic means of reproduction. In the past I’ve made relief-prints with lino-blocks and card-blocks toughened with shellac, and I’ve produced monoprints from images drawn on glass and aluminium plates. I made one editioned etching of a Mari Lwyd, aided with an award from the Contemporary Art Society of Wales. I’ve never tried silkscreen printing, though I love the silkscreened images produced by my friend Paul Bommer.

A Risograph is a stencil printer, and I recently discovered exciting images being produced by the Risograph method at Ditto Press in London, where interesting artists and clients flock to work with an enthusiastic team of artist/printmakers. I’ve been collaborating with Ben, who has been deconstructing the cover artwork of Thaliad in order to remake it as a Risograph print. The above image is a screenshot of the artwork remade in six separate colour plates: yellow, green, black, orange, ‘federal’ blue and bright red.

The result of this collaboration will not be a print that reproduces the collage in the way of  giclee or photo-lithography. The Risograph print honours the original artwork while showing evidence of the stencilling technique combined with the judgement calls of the print-maker at every stage of the process. The stencilling inks won’t attempt to  reproduce the colours of the original, but will create their own versions of them to produce a print that is a fresh and craftsman-made object rather than a standardised commercial reproduction. It’s a technique that utilises modern technology, though the results have a slightly naive quality, with the colours fresh and jewel-like. And of course, it will enable me to offer for sale, print-versions of the original artwork, without going the way of a giclee. This is an exciting new development for me, and one that I hope, with Ben’s help,  to try again with images made specifically with the Risograph printer in mind.

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Above: detail of the original collage.

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You can see a clip of Ben

HERE

envelopes from the past

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We’ve acquired a new piece of kit in order to be able to transfer my old transparency archive to digital images. In the past we’ve always had image transfer done professionally, but with the aid of this Epson we can slowly work our way through the old ring-binders full of slides. (And there are more of them than I want to think about!) Today I found these images from a ‘Postal Art’ exhibition that the late Lizzie Organ did at the Kilvert Gallery in 1996. (I apologise that the images are a tad blurred. The magic Epson can’t correct a transparency that’s out-of-focus, and ‘image-sharpening’ on i-photo can only do so much.) In addition to a fold-flat toy theatre  for the exhibition, I submitted the envelopes illustrated here. They were stamped and franked and sent through the postal system to the gallery. There they were slipped into clip-frames, exhibited and sold.

I produced them by various means. I made the envelopes from thin Japanese paper given to me by Nicolas McDowall. I recall the images printed onto them were made by various means: rubber-stamps, transfer-printing using nail-varnish remover, and tiny lino-blocks of a glove, a tree, a dove and the frame to the stamp, that I brushed with bleach before printing onto water-soluble black ink. I wrote the addresses with a mapping-pen dipped in bleach. It was my first attempt at any kind of printing, and I crammed in every technique at my disposal. Reacquainting myself with the images all these years on, I’m rather pleased with them. They look like they’d contain letters from a land where the Brothers Grimm would be quite at home. The reality was more prosaic, as they held the delivery notes to the gallery which were removed before clip-framing. I wonder where the envelopes are now.

barnfield redux

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My friend Mathijs in the Netherlands wrote to me asking if I’d allow him to print one of the images made for the Old Stile Press 2001 edition of the Barnfield Sonnets, onto a t-shirt he planned to wear for a badminton tournament in Nijmegen. I e-mailed a handful of the Barnfield drawings for him to select from, and he made his choice. This evening he sent photographs of the result. I think he looks very handsome emblazoned with one of Barnfield’s beauties!

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Sweaty, but cool!

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witch

Done and dusted.

Linocut and title lettering: Clive Hicks-Jenkins

Design: Simon Hicks

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There will be an un-staged reading of Witch in the Studio of Aberystwyth Arts Centre

Thursday May 31st at 7.45 pm

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The Stages of a Book Cover

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Preliminary Drawings

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Paintings

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Above: discarded three-colour version

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Above: discarded three-colour decoration

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Block-cutting

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Block with paper stencil in place to check registration. For this project the stencil was deliberately misaligned in the final print in order to create a more primitive appearance. I was also sparing in cutting back the blank areas of the block, so that there would be flashes of  black around the marmoset to energise the image. Too much cleaning-up can de-nature a relief-print.

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Lino-cut print with stencilled red ground. The technique of adding colour to a print by means of stencilling is called ‘Pochoir’

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Lettering

Finally, I made the lettering for the cover using acrylic-worked paper-cuts

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In the finished design the stark white of the original paper has been replaced with a soft, neutral grey.

zekiel done

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Here’s the finished print of Zekiel. Enough glitches and misalignment to give it an attractive ‘chapbook’ feel, though satisfactorily inked for good contrast between the black and red. I am content. Below is the first, rejected proof, to compare.

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