Description
‘Over the Folded Hills’
Original ink, watercolour and pastel
Collect from gallery £380
Including UK delivery £400
Image H 9 x W 10 cm
Framed including 1.2 cm wide stained wood moulding H 29 x W 29 cm
Flora works from her print workshop in West Wales, on the edge of a wild moor, surrounded by lichened trees. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers (RE) and currently doing an MA in Fine Art at Aberystwyth School of Art.
Her work grows out of the experience of observing the landscape and the process of translating this experience into print. As she works on her pictures, she wants to evoke a single charmed moment out of time, a magical vision that stills. The scene is our ancient and enchanted landscape, roamed by guardian spirit-like animals, shadowed by woods where the holly springs green amongst the bare oaks and beeches.
She is inspired by the fairy tales she grew up reading, and by the motif of the quest in the medieval romance poetry she read during her English degree. She sees it as a venturing outwards and also inwards, entering the wild unruly forest of trees and thorns, searching for a transforming glimpse of the white hart.
For Flora etching is a slow and reflective process. The image moves through many stages of biting in the mordant, as she adds layers of line, texture, shadow and meaning, watching the image slowly become itself. She wants the image to look like a weathered relic from the distant past, briefly come alive for us to see.
Etching is the ideal medium for her purpose, with its mysterious blacks and glowing, darkened whites. Working the metal plate to make it show delicate watercolour washes or deep dark gouged marks is endlessly fascinating.
“I bite heavy time-worn textures into my plates using soft ground, either making shadowy layered transfer drawings with soft pencils, or impressing textures into the soft ground with cut, carved and scored collagraph plates, to give the feeling of an old woodcut. Then I like to take this flat impression and scrape and burnish the light back in, sculpting the metal. Painting cloudy washes of spit bite aquatint over the image brings it to life, gives it weather, frees the waters of the waste land.”
