Mixed media experiments

Seaweeds and cyanotypes have been exercising my mind a lot recently. Meghan Riepenhoff and Anna Atkins have both produced terrific outcomes in very different ways. I discovered, at a recent exhibition “Sea Gardens” at RAMM, Exeter (November 2019), that a vast range of algae caress our South Devon shores so I ventured to experiment, first with small sheets of cartridge paper, then with 1.5m lengths of wallpaper lining. The resultant cyanotypes are here.

It was after I had posted on FB some of the vignettes that I had isolated from my latest painting like these:

Fellow artist Richard Sunderland, contacted me to say that the work reminded him of the pliage work of Simon Hantaï. As I was not familiar with it, I was intrigued with his work on the Gagosian website so I tried it myself. The word plague means folding in French.

I took a section of my wallpaper lining paper, scored some straight lines on it, and then scrunched it as Hantaï would have done. Then, instead of painting the exposed facets, I painted them with molten wax, opened up the paper and covered it in cyanotype salts.

When it was dry, I exposed it to a UV lamp, opened it and ironed out the wax and was left with this:

The straight lines are not immediately visible, you have to look for them. I knew I wanted to pain the white spaces but I didn’t know how I would do that so I left it for a while and got back to it some 3 weeks later when I thought I would approach it as a stained glass window. I started with a green belt, thinking I would do a landscape and combined yellow and blue acrylic paint very roughly and applied the paint so that the brush strokes would show. I also made the decision to paint contiguous sections the same colour.

I also made the decision that I would mix the 5 colours and that I would not use single colours except for a small patch of black and another of red. there was no rationale for that, just an intuition that that’s what I would do.

This is the resultant piece, backlit on a window by the sunshine.

I realised then that the more important bits for me were smaller sections of the piece:

Reacting to the experiment, Richard commented: “The contrast between warm and cool colours adds spatial dimension to the composition. I started thinking of Van Gogh sunflowers. Something to do with your mark making.”

On reflection, I liked these smaller sections because they reminded me of the seaweed on the treated cyanotype sheets printing in the sun:

I am very grateful to Richard for having put Simon Hantaï on my radar because it allowed me to experiment in ways I would never have tried.