Blue Series

An experiment, and I’d rather say so than dress it up as anything more settled.

One block, cut to a single shape: an elongated diamond, off-square, with edges that break and tear rather than holding a clean line. A cut edge on lino wants to be crisp, and I was interested in what happens when you stop it being. Beyond the shape there’s nothing on the block at all — nothing carved into it, no pattern, no image. The surface is flat.

Everything you can see happened in the inking. That’s the whole experiment: what I laid down, how much of it, and then what I did to it once it was sitting on the lino before the paper went anywhere near. Twelve attempts, twelve different things tried, all from the same block and all in blue.

There are twelve and there won’t be more, and they’re not really an edition because no two are alike. The tearing at the edges never happens the same way twice, and the surface holds ink differently every time depending on what I’ve done to it. What I expected to be twelve versions of one print turned out to be twelve separate ones.

That’s the part worth keeping. Fix everything that can be fixed — one shape, one colour, one block — and the small amount left free turns out to contain far more than it looks like it should. It’s the same thing I keep finding in the drawings, reached from the opposite direction: much less on the paper, and a good deal more surprise in it.