
Local Habitation: The Wall
Local Habitation.
..Suite of 3 aquatint & spit-bite etchings
20 x 26" on Rives BFK edition 10 2013

Local Habitation: The Flyer
“And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, ……
the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
from A Midsummer's Night Dream
W Shakespeare
Local Habitation is a suite of three etchings -reflections on creative manifestation.
The three pictures are drawn with aquatint in a photographic style.
The plates are etched with nitric acid that works by dissolving unprotected plate into vapor.
For the clouds I used a rarely chosen opaque white ink coloured with the plate’s own oxide.
Spit bite is carried on water so I used that to carry the aquatint to etch the traffic flow and the cloud-like imagery.
The coalescing of water into cloud into shape,
meets the photograph
- a visual imprint of light.
Thus the images are created at the crossroads,
the X Y axis of two abstractions,
two airy nothings.
The forms of things unknown, ……
the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
from A Midsummer's Night Dream
W Shakespeare
Local Habitation is a suite of three etchings -reflections on creative manifestation.
The three pictures are drawn with aquatint in a photographic style.
- Of the the east side of Boulevard St Laurent, at Rachel in Montreal. My studio's about half-way down the street.
- Of the Inside of my next studio, near St Joseph, the figure I call The flyer dangles in front of my shelves.
- Of the wall in that studio, drawings of two 3-d portraits, myself- the flame-head clay figure- images reflecting Grunewald, Blake, and the puppets of Rilke.
The plates are etched with nitric acid that works by dissolving unprotected plate into vapor.
For the clouds I used a rarely chosen opaque white ink coloured with the plate’s own oxide.
Spit bite is carried on water so I used that to carry the aquatint to etch the traffic flow and the cloud-like imagery.
The coalescing of water into cloud into shape,
meets the photograph
- a visual imprint of light.
Thus the images are created at the crossroads,
the X Y axis of two abstractions,
two airy nothings.