Sunset, Top Withens

The prints made by Ian Brooks are rooted in close observation of the landscape and a fascination with its small-scale details and textures. Each piece aims to evoke the unique atmosphere or sense of place of a specific location and point in time, responding to the weather as much as the landscape itself.

 

While using photographic reference at times out of necessity, he prefers to work from sketches made in the wild, working with pencil and washes of acrylic ink in a variety of sketchbooks. These better capture the immediacy of the emotional response to the surroundings. Back in the studio, the images are redrawn directly onto copper plate, working with the traditional (even antiquated) techniques of sugar lift and spit-bite aquatint. A dusting of resin, melted and fused to the plate, provides a half-tone when bitten by the acid. The images are built up in layers of tightly-controlled drawing alternated with more abstract, semi-random marks – applied with sponges, tissue paper, cotton buds, and other improvised tools – to mimic the natural textures of the landscape. The smoke-like tonal transitions result from painting the acid on with a brush (spit-bite – so called because traditionally saliva was used to break the surface tension of the acid), allowing very subtle gradations of tone.

 

While working, Brooks finds a constant tension between a natural and deeply ingrained tendency towards realism and finely rendered detail, and a conscious desire to simplify and abstract the image to achieve a looser rendering that maintains the energy of sketches made in the field. 

 

Etching in general, and aquatint in particular, can be rather mercurial processes. The acid bite is subject to a multitude of changeable factors only partly under the artist’s control – temperature, strength of acid, the density of aquatint resin on the plate. Until printed the result is always uncertain since the artist is effectively working blind, judging the depth of bite and final tone as much by intuition as the clock. To make a successful print requires responding to the vagaries of the process, and ultimately leaving reference material, and sometimes the initial intention, behind, and following the needs of each particular image.

Etching on Paper

2020

26x50cm

Image Size: 8x30cm

Framed under glass

Edition of 20