Carborundum

Carborundum is the naturally occurring mineral silicon carbide that has the beneficial property of being extremely tough. In a printing studio its often found as an abrasive used to grind lithographic stones flat. One other use however is to simply mix it with PVA glue or acrylic paint and apply it directly to any robust plate material. The carborundum areas will hold ink beautifully and give fantastic texture. Its particularly useful for colour printing where several plates each inked in a different colour and printed together.

I'm posting a few prints where I painted carborundum onto a perspex plate. The perspex areas can be wiped totally clean if desired and the carborundum areas left full of ink to give a nice high contrast image.

The beauty of zombification

I've got a bit of a thing about zombies at the moment. Regular visitors to the blog will see how they can fit in with my body of work... themes of strange distortions and aberation from the norm are my sort of thing. These three chaps are prints made using a lithographic ink called touche painted onto a zinc plate. With a little bit of encouragement and follow up etching this material naturally creates intricate beautiful detail which I have subverted to create these horrific undead. Hopefully the detail can be seen if you look closely.

Horror and Humour

Something that I really enjoy observing when people look through my art work is that they may laugh at one image and then are aghast at the next. I have many diverse themes in my imagery but for me there are threads that bind and link them all. There is a character who appears in varied guises in many works and has been appearing for years. He is the diver; now transmuting into a bee-keeper and more lately the arctic explorer. A lot of the images where this figure appears deal with my feelings of the how humans relate to the world beyond the limits of their body. I've posted an image drawn and printed only today; it has a working title at the moment. A lot of the titles I give my work take a long time to be decided upon and sometimes change over time as fresh prints are produced from the plate. I hope to allow the viewers own consciousness to determine the true meaning of an image; to not be mis-directed by my title and in a very minor way perhaps lead the viewer to question or even understand themselves a little better through the process.