I see that you have kept the making of your
printwork as part of a process, using zinc plated,
photographic elements and the drawn images. The
screen prints using paper
and glass as part of divulgent medium putting into
question the texture and viability of each method of
printing in its context. Both style of work provide
for us a different
sample of media, and incidently the information or
message is not compomised but enhanced.
Firstly the etchings. Despite the titles; 'Arriving
Ambrosden' etc which denote a naming closely
associated with the artists choice of tree, with its
own special significance
for you, which no doubt once asked can explain to
both the viewer and the buyer.
One feels there is a need for a title, perhaps the
closeness of technique and depiction of similar but
different tree; this you have provided for us.
The trees take on a significance different for each
individual viewer, perhaps waving in the wind, the
scientific nature of the study (or work) feels
produced in the scientific
laboratory that is your artist studio. The curt white
background, a statement of a negative, or
photographic eulogy to the blue screen (used as
backdrops in films eg. in the
fifties driving cars, singing as the background very
unsubtily passes by quite irreverently to the singing
actors). I still maintain the scientific notion of
methodology,
practice and thought provoking revelation that this
despite the latent connotations for nature, are an
experiment of isolation and the test tube (of art).
The starch brightness and contrast in Photoshop,
an
isolationist tool for foreground objects, makes the
artwork stand to date. The interwoven veins of
branch and twig, and
indeed tree trunk take on not a mechanical detail
but a human one of the future, every tried and
tested method has eventually lent towards your
work. Even in judgement
we ask what are we doing here, observing a pristine
creation, are we harking to the tradition of the
study of the tree. Is this the tree of health, the
heritage of our lands,
the family tree. Under the lighting, under the
stethoscope we are challenged and then the
thought arrives that this indeed is a landscape
negatively strobed across our
mind, the tree the reminder of what is there but we
cannot see. Stark we are left standing.
The Screen Prints remind me of a distant uncle of
mine in Waldringfield, Suffolk who painstakingly
drew and painted the minutae of plant life as a
record and plant
dictionary of the plants and flowers around him.
Admirably enough he painted for the same book all
his life and there was a remarkable low print run.
The record was made and upheld by him, bar the
monks who illustrated and wrote in hand the
famous scripts of the bible. There were very little
reward given except for the
devotion of mind and talent towards the record of
skill and literal effect on the educated, and indeed
the historian today.
Blissfully, I now feel surrounded by your imagery
reminding of Waldringfield, the sun, the fauna and
flora. The first living artist to perform such honest
and direct plant life I
reckon was Albrecht Durer, the master German
printer and painter, the ultimate realist and
explorer of divine detail both in the 'Rabbit', the
'Grass' and his biblical prints.
Without the ground being seen again we are asked
about the origins or the whereabouts of 'nature'.
When I reckon on the making and inhibited
understanding of the
subject matter the same plural understanding
comes through. We are helped by you to
understand that the essence is everything.
