David Krut Print Workshop, Arts On Main

On the 8th to the 13th of February 2010 Deborah Bell worked with David Krut Workshop Manager, Jill Ross, at the newly established workshop at Arts On Main. Bell was the first artist to collaborate with Jill Ross in this space and ‘christened’ it by working on and creating a new series of monotypes.

Deborah Bell creating monotype

Monotypes are created through a technique where images are built-up through layers of ink, and it is generally a more flexible and experimental form of printmaking. Monotypes include processes where there is no set editioned plate. Ink is rolled directly on to a “bed” of perspex, for a once off print, or possibly two of different depth and opacity(a print and its ‘ghost’)

Bell’s monotypes were created mainly through an alternating process of printed layers and imagery, with the artist’s painted washes and drip marks giving her work an underlying energy. It was very interesting to watch these works ‘grow’ from start to finish, completely transforming in colour, mood and textures through layers of drawn line, ink and paint. The interlocking layers of media and of imagery created through this process reinforces Bell’s mythical imagery that seems to both emerge and recede from her dense and richly textured surfaces.

Bell handpainting etchings

Some of these works , as well as other intaglio works, will be shown at the Joburg Art Fair this March

David Koloane is an artist who grew up in the township of Alexandra and has worked in the arts in South Africa for more than 25 years.  During this time, Koloane has explored many different techniques to create highly emotive art pieces.  Focusing on painting in acrylic and water colour, and making prints using etching and drypoint processes, Koloane has developed a unique and inspirational body of work.

Drawing reference from his surroundings, Koloane’s work usually alludes to the complex urban landscapes of Johannesburg.  Imbued with both political and social commentary, Koloane’s works express strong emotional linkages to events and spaces in and around the city.

‘Koloane’s interpretation of urban life has struggled and triumphed in finding different visions and modes, techniques, materials to express the huge oppressions, upheavals, and hard-won freedoms that have been epitomised in our cities sprawl.’ (Tadjo 2002:4)

Predominantly focused on architectural and social landscapes, he has also drawn from more abstract references to comment on social conditions.  Koloane’s ‘Snarling Dogs’ (1993-1994) paintings, for example, draw on imagery of the township dog to express the extreme socio-economic conditions, and their psychosocial side effects surrounding him.

‘They are scavengers turning over rubbish bins.  Howling under the moonlight, sending shivers down the spines of the residents.  It is the primal fear of past nightmares, of a time without laws.  Unpredictable.  Terrifying.’ (Tadjo 2002:29)

Koloane’s latest series of drypoint prints, ‘Wings of Freedom’, returns to an emotive expression of social conditions through the symbolism of township animals.  In this series, images of doves are used to explore the development of his personal relationship with ‘freedom’ in the new South Africa. Using his characteristically unrestrained marks, Koloane has developed a drypoint technique that captures the expressionistic essence of his paintings.  Working with a free hand, Koloane focuses on creating energy in his prints rather than restricting himself to life-like renditions of his subjects.

January 26, 2010 – William Kentridge Nose was launched at Arts On Main to a wonderful reception. As well as the launch of the publication, it was the first time that the suite of thirty etchings, Nose, were exhibited together. Kentridge’s Museum of Modern Art exhibition, and the premiere of the opera, Nose, at the Metropolitan Opera House, both New York, open in March 2010.

The photographs below were very kindly provided by Ben Law-Viljoen.

The photographs below were kindly provided by Lingo Rodrigues of Halftone Studios.

Hanging NOSE

NOSE: Suite of 30 Etchings

William Kentridge Nose

Paul Stopforth is currently full time visiting faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and an artist who draws on memories and fragmented visions of South Africa, where he grew up. It is his positioning within the diaspora that plays a vital role in his image-making processes.

When he stepped into the David Krut Workshop in late October 2006, at the beginning of a week-long visit to Johannesburg, he was about to embark on an etching project that would appropriately mimic some of the tensions of his own life. It is a project that reveals the influence of time and distance on visuality and the process of decision-making that goes into making artworks.

Due to time constraints, Stopforth worked with me on a single copper plate. He began by simply drawing into an acid-resistant ground on the surface of the plate and etching these linear marks. Subsequently aquatints were added in various stages. The plate was proofed using a variety of inks and papers during that week, however, he left having not completely resolved the image. I continued experimenting with dyed Chine Collé papers and inks in his absence, sending him photographs as the proofs rolled off the press.

It was almost three years later, in May 2009, that Stopforth returned to South Africa. Knowing he would have an opportunity to rework the image prior to his departure, he came up with an idea while discussing screenprinting with an American printer. Together they decided that through the medium of screenprinting we could achieve a sense of layering by introducing further imagery on top of the image of the Blanket Pins.

At the beginning of this second visit Stopforth presented us with an ink drawing of a tap, done on Acetate. This particular kind of tap is synonymous with South African sports fields and school playgrounds. His intention was to expose the drawing onto a screen for further proofing on top of the numerous etchings we had printed as tests.

Although I have experience in screenprinting, the David Krut Print Workshop lacks the necessary equipment for editioning in this medium. It was at about this time that we met Lingo Rodrigues who was learning the art of screenprinting in his Centurion studio. Lingo offered to proof and edition the final screenprinted layer once we had discussed what compositional options we had available to us. It was also necessary for the artist to see the results of this proofing so that a final decision could be made on the editions before Stopforth returned home to the US.

With so many people influencing the creation of this print it is hardly surprising that it exudes a feeling of unrest. The layering of the tap and its decorative background (on top of the Blanket Pins) deceives one’s perceptions of depth and the differentiation between the two shapes within one image.

What is noteworthy in the making of this print is the artist’s levels of intervention. In the drawing of the tap and the pins he is in complete control of the image. On other levels we see him deliberately losing control to haphazard mark-making: the drips of aquatint behind the pins were created in an uncontrolled manner.

Similarly, the tap is screenprinted as a final layer with no planned mode of contact. As a result some interesting effects occur where etching ink mingles with screen printing ink unexpectedly. It was interesting to observe how the image metamorphosed as a result of Stopforth spending so much time away from it. The drastic decisions that he made regarding the print could be attributed to his art-making endeavors between visits to South Africa.

In some instances artists are forced to suspend their influence on the processes that take place in a printmaking studio. In this particular case the artist had no choice but to let go – there’s not much one can do from a painting studio in Boston when your South African printers are working on your proofs.

Successful prints are often achieved when mistakes are treated as points of departure rather than irreversible acts.

In an e-mail exchange with me, the artist said the following of his prints:

While artist-in-residence on Robben Island in 1994 I became fascinated by a blanket pin on display in the prison that had been created by one of the political prisoners out of a found length of high tensile wire. As a fragment of time and place this humble, beautifully formed object seemed to contain so much of the history of both the Island and the mainland. Much of my work since the early seventies has made use of fragments of the South African environment to engage with questions of history and memory, and these fragments from ‘home’ continue to occupy me although I now live and work in the United States.

In the print I have repeated the image of the pin as an object that reflects and mirrors itself. It is perfectly self-contained. Both are suspended in a broken, textured field and the whole image is ‘held’ in place formally in the bottom left hand corner by a fragment of design from a Malian mud cloth.

For centuries blankets have kept the cold at bay in various parts of Southern Africa. Blanket pins are therefore an essential and functional device in the lives of many people. These prints celebrate that object and that fact.

As of September 2009, three variant editions have been printed, one of which has the tap imagery screenprinted to the edge of the paper margins. One of the editions is the etching by itself, and the third edition is still being experimented with. The tap has been screenprinted on top of monotypes, and as a print that stands alone. Due to the extent of proofing in this project, many of these “tests” will be sold as monotypes.

Khongisa and Koloane

2009 has also seen the culmination of several projects begun the year before. The two most noteworthy of these were most likely a series of works by Deborah Bell, and the artist’s book by Austrian artist Friedrich Danielis.

left: Friedrich Danielis, Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Mlungisi Khongisa. right: Maja Maljevic and Jillian Ross

Deborah Bell’s prints, which were exhibited under the name Collaborations were created across two continents with DKW Manger Jillian Ross, master printer Phil Sanders of the Robert Blackburn Print Studio and the highly-esteemed

“March 1^st

Many unusual phenomena now indicated that we were entering upon a region of wonderment and novelty” reports Edgar Allan Poe in “The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” on his journey to the edge of the world, traversing the Antarctic expanse of white miracles.

Risking his mind and his life (both are lost and found in the same place, Poe’s book) Pym delves in to the world of fantasy and imagination, crossing the last frontier of common sense (it makes sense no more), and arrives at the heart of the periphery, well away from the centre of power and influence, at the rim of the world, where what has no place otherwise will take place, taking its rightful place by inventing itself.

It is there, beyond the reach of law&order’s long arm (and long fingers!), at the end of certainty, that things start to happen, ideas shape up and come into being that are worth existing, and the margins become a fitting address of the marginalized people of imagination, impudence and passion, as it is in the margins that we write the text making sense of the increasingly murky book of homogenized “life” presented by the powers that be, but needn’t.

Artists turned migrants, inventors and outlaws, exceptional but unacceptable, put themselves to work, un-bid and un-paid, without help from above, and create new life in the Dead Sea of Conformity.

Traversing the miraculously divided Red Sea has helped once before, so it pleases a painter – not just for this, it is the color red that attracts – to pass through the sea of colors as it, miraculously, obeys him and his hands, rising and breaking in silence under the gaze of its creator, and even at its shores much remains to be seen.

Ignorance, on the other hand, the powers that be’s favored child, spoiled, pampered and overweight, remains close to its overly protective guardians in their province of boorish might, grows and prospers until the whole world turns provincial in its image and likeness (the true meaning of globalisation?) – ruling the capitals of pride and punishment and their vast hinterlands of waste and neglect.

From all this there could never be enough distance, but we must try, and the rim promises some relief, even the freedom to live up to our dreams and desires. Nothing has to happen in hiding at the edge of the world, – to exist unobserved and free from undue curiosity turns out to be the perfect state of and for ideas; right on the rim, in the heart of the periphery, we get to the heart of the matter as it comes into focus.

“March 21^st

At intervals there were visible in the wide, yawning but momentary rents, and from these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came a rushing and mighty, but soundless wind, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.”

The above text is by Friedrich Danielis for his exhibition “Right On the Rim” (2009)

Links:

Friedrich Danielis at DKW
TAXI Art Film 005: Friedrich Danielis

Working at Krut’s (And Visiting Lovis)

To find out more about Paul Stopforth, see http://paulstopforth.com/

Friedrich Danielis, an Austrian artist, has visited South Africa twice, accompanied both times by his wife and concert cellist, Susan Salm. Both immediately fell in love with the country, going so far as to call South Africa a place “where even the unbelievable turns true”. On both occasions, Danielis took the oppurtunity to work at the David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) in Johannesburg. During his most recent visit during August 2008 he created the artist’s book: WORKING AT KRUT’s (and visiting Lovis)

WORKING AT KRUT’s (and visiting Lovis) is the title of a leporello printed by Friedrich Danielis.The leporello was printed in an edition of 15 signed and numbered copies which was created at DKW. Danielis has said of the project: “Last autumn, in Johannesburg, six copper plates were given strong and tender lines, outbursts of activity and quiet halts, to form a set of variations that unfolds to take the eyes along on this adventure – a new artist’s book… an intimate book that unfolds into a monumental strip of etchings when fully opened.”

The leporello comprises six drypoint and three aquatints, that were printed in collaboration with DKW printmakers Mlungisi Khongisa and Niall Bingham, and folded and bound by Peter Gruenauer in Vienna, making this a truly international project,a work of two worlds. The six delicate drypoint plates where printed by Mlungisi Khongisa, of whom Danielis has said that “the dream-like quality of this printers art fulfills my dream!”. The three aquatint plates began life as handwriting on paper, which was transferred to a screen for screenprinting, and were then painstakingly transferred to aquatints for the final editioning of the leporello.

Below is a excerpt from text by Friedrich Danielis, bearing the exhibition’s title: Right On the Rim

Many unusual phenomena now indicated that we were entering upon a region of wonderment and novelty” reports Edgar Allan Poe in “The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” on his journey to the edge of the world, traversing the Antarctic expanse of white miracles.

Risking his mind and his life (both are lost and found in the same place, Poe’s book) Pym delves in to the world of fantasy and imagination, crossing the last frontier of common sense (it makes sense no more), and arrives at the heart of the periphery, well away from the centre of power and influence, at the rim of the world, where what has no place otherwise will take place, taking its rightful place by inventing itself.

It is there, beyond the reach of law and order’s long arm (and long fingers!), at the end of certainty, that things start to happen, ideas shape up and come into being that are worth existing, and the margins become a fitting address of the marginalized people of imagination, impudence and passion, as it is in the margins that we write the text making sense of the increasingly murky book of homogenized “life” presented by the powers that be, but needn’t.

  The exhibition will conclude on 13 June 2009