For the last few weeks I’ve been busy producing a lot of printing plates. All this work is in preparation for a landscape-inspired exhibition at The Steel Rooms in Brigg, scheduled for February 2019. Some of the prints will be work inspired by my visit to Iceland last year, where I saw waterfalls, glaciers, geysirs and amazing rock formations. Most intriguing was the lava rock formations that bordered the road on our excursions out of Reykjavik to see these sights. Literally every hill and mountain is an extinct volcano, with active ones towards the interior.

Most of the new plates are abstract in nature, using pumice gel, crackle paste and other acrylic gels. For others, I sliced up small pieces of raffia and mixed them in with the gels. Occasionally, I like to dip into more figurative work based on photographs. ‘Myrdalshreppur’ is one of those, where the different texture areas were sketched onto the board before applying the gels with plastic shaping tools.

Sketches for a range of landscape-inspired printing plates

Myrdalshreppur – sketch of one of the figurative plates inspired by a mountain in southern Iceland

Myrdalshreppur – detail of the resulting plate

I have high particularly high hopes for the plate shown below. It was made in response to a photograph I took of an area of the Lincolnshire Wolds where I live. I wanted to capture a sense of the rolling hills and the wind on that day. I experimented with mixing carborundum powder with gel and a little water – just thin enough to be able to paint the medium on with a brush.

One of the plates I have managed to print recently is this one (below). It is one of my ‘Imagined Landscape’ prints, inspired by the work of one of my favourite printmakers, Brenda Hartill.

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