Cave art

I’ve just returned from time travelling again – I’ve been drawing in many of the painted caves and stone shelters of the Dordogne. It’s been an amazing experience. Some caves are very deep but have been made easy to visit – Rouffignac is an example. It’s easier because there is a small electric train that takes you several kilometres in and stops to let you look carefully at the images on the walls (mostly mammouths there). Others are more difficult because the floors are often uneven and you have to be very careful not to touch the walls because of the danger of damage. Many of the caves have very limited opening times now and will only allow small numbers of people in – often five or six at a time – because of the danger of changing the atmosphere and causing the images to deteriorate. None of them allow light to be on for very long or to be bright, so you have to move around in the dark most of the time – not ideal if you’re trying to make drawings as you go! The most difficult to visit was Bernifal – it’s not often open and it has no electricity – the current ‘owner’ is in his eighties and brings a car battery in a bag, with a small light attached. The very small group allowed in follow him into the dark and have to dodge stalactites and stalacmites! Some of the caves are very wet too – you sometimes have to kneel down to see images, so it’s a completely embodied experience and not only a visual one.

I made quite a lot of small drawings, usually in the dark, so I was often surprised when I came out and saw what I’d done. Some are of the journey into the caves – curving cave walls and constantly changing directions:

Here are a few of the drawings I made of the images I saw:

In Rouffignac there was an amazing slightly domed roof that was covered with drawings of animals that seemed to tumble in all directions:

There is also a stone-age joke – a horse’s head seeming to be hiding and watching three rhinocerous go by:

I’ve now got so much work to do from these, trying to catch something of the experience of visiting our past!

Mawgan Porth

We’ve just been in Mawgan Porth for a few days – in Cornwall, between Newquay and Padstow. We’d been down there a year or so ago and both made a series of drawings of the beautiful bay and, further along the coast, the great rock pillars of Bedruthan Steps. That last time had been in November and freezing cold, so we were hoping for clear skies and warmth this time and were lucky! We made lots more drawings and colour studies and

I’ve made two monoprints since we’ve been back. They both have an image from a woodcut made from a drawing of a tidepool in Mawgan Porth bay. The first also incorporates a small drypoint print of the sand and sea and the second includes an etching of a similar image, both built into the print using a chine colle method.

I like making monoprints because the immediacy enables an idea to be developed very fast. I particularly like to be able to include other elements of my ‘visual language’ to link ideas. These prints were both made using Akua Intaglio on Arches 88 paper.

Ancient Goddess

I’ve almost completed a series of monoprints about visiting the past, focusing on two ‘Venus’ figures that were made around 30,000 years ago. In May I visited the Dordogne and spent a lot of time in the painted and carved caves, the ancient shelters, the archeological sites and the museums, immersed in our pre-historic art. I made drawings (many in the dark in the caves) and on returning home I had no time to work with them because I had booked to go on a workshop with the American printmaker Ron Pokrasso. It was during the workshop that I discovered a way of working with these ideas, using monoprint and some wonderfully rich American inks, Akua Intaglio (check Ron’s website http://ronpokrasso.com for a demo of his techniques and info about his inspirational workshops).

I had an Open Studios show through most of the rest of June, so had to progress fairly slowly, but I’ve been immersed in printmaking through July and now have about 40 prints using these ideas. The first group use the Venus of Sireuil, thinking about my encounter with her, her time underground while we and our predecessors walked above, her emerging into our world and bringing evidence of a past in which she was conceived, shaped, carried around and cared for. The second Venus I introduced later into the series was the Venus of Willendorf, from about 32,000BC and found in Austria – I used her because she is the most familiar image and much easier to recognise as a figure from pre-history than the Venus of Sireuil.

Here are some of the earlier prints, where I have linked the very dominant menhirs, standing stones that have a strong masculine character, with the Venus figure, changing sizes, strength and focus:

I made two prints with a message on them (that I’d seen in a Cornish museum some time ago and liked), ‘Don’t change the stones, let the stones change you’ – here is one:

Some of the prints were explicitly about the Venus being buried and found through archaological digs, exposed in the layers of time:

More pebbles and some rocks

I made a more complicated composite with one of the pebble monotypes by linking it with two monoprints. I wanted to bring some water images close to the pebbles and to keep people in the image, so I used a woodcut of ripples of water printed over a monotype sandy texture, then added a print of the row of people used in the previous pebble composites.

Walk on the beach

I also made a further set of monotypes of water flowing over rocks (an image I’d developed in Cornwall) and I added three mermaids to these to build a composite image, linked to ideas about the mermaid of Zennor.

On the rocks