I seem to be physically incapable of making an edition- despite printmaking being the medium of multiples.

I have tried, but honestly I find it a bit boring, and my skillset doesn’t lie in recording colour mixes in minute detail or timings of acid baths.

What I like to do is iterations.  Start with essentially the same composition (the printing plate) and play around it with paper, colour, collage and format variations. Throw myself a constraint and then push it to the max.  This is the painter side of me coming out, the spontaneous artist who wants to be with the flow.

So the secret, I’ve discovered, is trying to dance between the essential planning that printmaking demands (at least what colours and layers you’d like to use) and the decisions that can be made on the spot as I print and afterwards.

I’ve just made a YouTube video about the making of my Spring collection, which is a series of series, if you will. A set of printing plates, printed over several months. Each print, printed slightly differently, and then taken to the home studio to work on – some turning out very differently to their original state, others staying pretty much as they came out of the press.

This started partly as a practicality – if a print didn’t print so well, or not quite as I wished, instead of wasting it (and the paper) I would work on it until it either became what I wanted, or something else entirely unplanned.  Either way, it would likely tell me something new about the way I like to work, or could work.  Now, I purposely allow for this process within my practice.  It allows me to print loose and free, be spontaneous in how I print and make decisions in the home studio.

I make a ‘baggy plan’.  A very rough composition sketch (actually this is arrived at via several very rough composition sketches) translates into a printing plate (most often a metal, card or plastic drypoint etching plate- sometimes I re-use old plates, allowing the ghost of the older marks to show through).  I keep the composition and plate as simple as possible, so that I can give full rein to the variations described above as I print.  

You can perhaps see why I’m such an advocate of honing composition skills now – everything else rests on the composition, and when printmaking this is the first thing to figure out, not the last (as sometimes in painting). In fact, in my work, it is really the only thing that I plan ahead of time.

I rarely give up on a print these days, there isn’t much that can’t be saved with a bit of collage, monoprint or severe cropping (one of my favourite ways to completely transform something that isn’t working).

So, the outcome is a series of art works on paper, that have a passing family resemblance, the same DNA, but different life experiences.  

How do you balance the unending dance of control and freedom, constraint and variation, nature and nurture?