Pentad
There are around twenty Pentads, all of which were made in the first few months of 2022 in a fairly intensive burst of activity. They are drawn/printed on a heavy Albion Cotton paper and are 103cm high and 153cm wide. They are made by doing an initial drawing and then printing five separate sections, using Lino plates, over the top. Mostly they have only those two layers but occasionally I added a third. A Pentad is a thing of five parts.
I’m not sure now where the initial impetus came from. I’d just moved house and for the first time in many years I was able not only to have access to all my old work, including all of the work on paper which had been stored away, but also all the old plates I had used to make linocut prints and mixed media pieces. I was going to throw all the plates away - I’d been using them, re-cutting them, re-printing them, making variants for the best part of twenty years and didn’t really want to use any of them ever again. But when I spread them out on the floor it suddenly occurred to me that I could cut them and print them as sections, so I spent several days cutting the columnar sections of Pentad and the field with inset sections for another set called Insets.
Most of my print/drawings have employed webs of lines, either as all-over fields or as fields composed of a grid of units, each of which contains a set of such lines. Anyone who works with linear webs is going to owe a debt of influence to Jackson Pollock and, in my case, also to Brice Marden, but whenever the results look too derivative I scrap the work and start again. I drew webs onto the five plates so that the lines never transgressed the edge of the plate but always bounced back into the overall field. Then I drew an all-over linear design on each piece of paper, sometimes with a thin graceful line, sometimes with a thicker bolder line. I tried to make these drawings with as little inhibition as possible. Then I began the longer process of printing the plates over the drawings using black and white printing inks thin enough for the web to show through but thick enough to white-out, or black-out, everything but the cut lines.
All that sounds confusing when put into words but is hopefully crystal clear when looking at the resulting prints/paintings. What I find wonderful about working like this is the unexpected beauty of the results - even with fairly simple combinations of lines, the process of concealing all but where another line crosses over produces an often startling and unpredictable complexity. This is the pleasure and also the pain of employing printmaking techniques; it’s possible to waste weeks, months, trying to find something which works but every now and then an idea, a process, simply comes out the way you want it to, which is how it was with the Pentads. They emerged with just the degree of clarity I wanted - so that the viewer could decode quite easily their layering and how they were made, but at the same time I wanted that slight shock of their appearance being deceptive, defying the easy logic of their own process.
They are light and airy and have, for the most part, a stately quality, of something which processes across the image with a quiet dignity. At the same time they are zipping around like firecrackers, with a density of mark and a fine-ness of line which seems to work, as Michael Fried once remarked before a Pollock painting, on the angstrom level. It’s as if, just beneath the facade of a Greek temple, the stone is breaking down into speeding particles so that an ostensible solidity is suddenly revealed to be a feverish mass of colliding atoms. A billion neutrinos, I heard a physicist say in a film, just went through my nose.
It is that mystery of the nature of matter which I think these works address. Freed from obvious representation they are able to move rather fluidly between categories, particularly those which try to fix matter into categories: solid, liquid, gas. The divisions between the sections, literal divisions between the plates transposed into metaphorical divisions in the image, remind me of all those experiments which are conducted to monitor the passing of one substance through another. I have always liked the word osmosis. The Pentads are a visual meditation upon such porous borders, where they are both observed and transgressed in the same moment.