Recent Techniques

Collagraph printmaking, as the name suggests, comes from collage, in which a composition of materials, textures and pieces are glued to a plate, to be inked afterwards and passed through a press with an absorbent surface like damp paper on top. The final results are the imprint of the plate on the absorbing paper surface and the inked plate itself. What is most interesting about the collagraph technique is that it uses sculpting (construction and carving of textures on the plate), painting (composition of colours and inking) and printmaking (imprint on a surface) all as part of the same process.

Paintings: In my recent paintings on canvas I employed some of these "collagraph" processes and printmaking techniques. In fact, most of the paintings are composed like a collage by creating textures with carborandum (fine carbon powder), sand and moulding paste, and then attaching textures and objects to them. The oil or acrylic paints are handled as if they were inks for prints, that is, they are applied in thick layers with a spatula and then cleaned off to leave a layer which is worked over with a roller or brush. This is similar to traditional printmaking, where the plate is etched or engraved, inked and then cleaned off and pressed onto paper or other media.

In my recent work, the two techniques of collagraph printmaking and painting have been used simultaneously and complement each other: Imprints of objects, textures, carvings on moulding paste, the use of real objects like string and traditional painting techniques are featured.

Andrea Soler