Collagraph printing: Where now?

Kitchen table, first wave.

I began today determined to clear up the kitchen table, and it happened, but then a second wave hit it and that was that. Like the pilgrim rucksack, it contains one's entire life of the moment. The new wave was on return from the Ropewalk with my creations, my first ever collagraph prints. I discovered what I already knew, the difference between relief printing, as in linocuts where only the surface is inked, and intaglio printing, where ink is pressed into the depressions as well as the surface and then sucked out into the paper it's printed on.

Printing plate, pilgrim's progress.

Second wave: my first-ever collagraph prints.

The plates we made today consisted of mount-board, cut into and scratched, embellished with foil, wallpaper, carborundum, permanent PVA glue, French polish, and embossed with sandpaper and cloth to give texture. There's a lot of potential in this technique, it's even quite addictive. There's a lot of control in the preparation side of it, then when it is put through the mangle-press as I call it, there's an element of surprise when the thing is unveiled.

The pilgrim returns

Naturally my subject-matter was pilgrimage, but fortuitously I forgot to reverse the image I used, based on the paper camino representation of the metal sculptures on the Alto de Perdon. Thus, like it or not, the pilgrim is on the return journey! Going W to E! But on the plate, the pilgrim is still progressing. In many ways, the plates are more pleasing than the prints, as the shellac varnish gives a lovely warm tone to it reminiscent of Samuel Palmer's prints. It's a start anyway.

Having a little time left over, I worked very fast to scrawl out whatever came to my mind, which was 'WHERE NOW? which is the predominant pilgrim thought a year on. Perhaps it even says something about the mood of the moment we live in. I don't feel very optimistic, do you? Does anyone? Is it just me, or is there a mood of gloom about just about everything? There are plenty of blessings to count, but somehow the bigger picture seems sort of sad. The back garden view analysed is a picture of calm, all stately horizontals and verticals, and no riot of colour to disturb the peace. But things never stay the same, do they? I can't help but feel that the world is waiting for the next thing, and I'm apprehensive, and to me the picture looks menacing. What has happened to my hula-hoop moments? My pink-brolly mood? Reader, if I have ever made you laugh, help me out now.

The back garden through a kitchen window pane

Such simplicity.....

A closer look

The "mangle-press"

I can't be cheered up tonight, not to pink-brolly degree anyway. But two things seem to embody hope. Firstly the wonderful "mangle-press", smoothly feeding the plate and paper through, with a handle heavy and Victorian in feel. Even better still is the simple way in which the prints were held in the drying rack. Just look - see how that marble drops and gently holds the paper without causing any claw-mark or buckling. Just the force of gravity combined with the brilliance of the human mind in thinking up something so simple, effective, and above all elegant. Someone must have invented it, probably way back in the mists of time, with no name now known to us. Will someone be telling me that this unassuming piece of technology was first used in war? I do hope not.

I thought about why I felt like this; am I just being a Luddite, or a computer dunce with a tendency to favour the mechanical and the physical? Or am I right in thinking that it is 'simple ideas [that] change lives forever', as the charity Practical Action proclaims? http://www.practicalaction.org As it says on their website:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.” – E.F. Schumacher