![]() It’s a layered process, which is often partly hidden from the artist until the final reveal. The crayon was then brought back into play to reinforce the shadows and accents, or to indicate figures and give them a sense of movement.” “He usually covered the whole stone with a uniform grey tint, and then removed the areas that were to be light with a scraper here a head, a figure, there a horse, a bull. He remained standing, walking backward and forward from moment to moment to judge the effect. ![]() He handled the crayons like paintbrushes and never sharpened them. One of his companions, the Spanish painter Antonio de Brugada, wrote about Goya’s unorthodox working method: “The artist worked at his lithographs on his easel, the stone placed like a canvas. Fingerprints and petroleum jelly body prints work nicely as well.”Īn artist who took an unconventional approach to lithography was Francisco de Goya. “Essentially you can draw with anything that contains grease – one artist we know drew a lithograph using butter. “The three main materials are stone, grease and water, as the entire printing process depends upon the principle that grease and water don’t mix,” says Dudley. It sounds complicated, but relies on a simple technique. The process is repeated for each layer of colour. The artist draws with special crayons, pencils and liquids (similar to watercolour) that contain grease, before using an etch mixture to fix the drawing onto the stone with a chemical reaction. The main material is the stone ( lithos in Ancient Greek). ![]() “The feeling of drawing the different mark-making materials across the freshly-grained surface had me hooked.” “I loved working with the stone,” she says. “While it is true that there are few lithographers in the world, certainly when compared to painters or sculptors, the art form is far from endangered.”ĭudley was drawn to lithography even before she’d etched a plate. That prompted the creation of an institute in the US which trains new master printers every year. “There was a point in the 1960s when the only printers were the few in France and Germany,” she tells BBC Culture. But according to Dudley, it’s not dying out. They are practitioners of a niche art form. Sarah Dudley and Ulli Kühle are lithographers, drawing on stone in layers of colour, etching with nitric acid, rolling on ink and printing onto acid-free cotton rag paper. Hypnotic in its measured pace and minimal soundtrack, a new video reveals a technique that goes back more than two centuries. Sliding, etching, scraping and sanding: the muffled sound of a roller the drip of acid on limestone the clunk as the stone is pushed into place.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |