I had an amazing week last week, finally going somewhere I have wanted to go for ages: up to Mpumulanga to spend a week in the White River studio of The Artist’s Press, under the direction of Mark Attwood. The setting is gorgeous, and totally different from Cape Town: a ridiculously lush subtropical garden filled with birds like lilac breasted rollers and paradise flycatchers.
Tamar Mason, Sheila Flynn, Mark Attwood, Colbert Mashile, Fred Clark and Josie Grindrod round the lunch table at The Artist’s Press
In the spacious studio. there are three Tamarind master printers on hand – Mark himself and Leshoko and Syneth - to facilitate the messy business of printing. Mark runs monoprint workshops from time to time, limited to five or six artists, and this was one of those.
The print studio
I trained as a printmaker, and after years of working in installation, video or photography, it is great to get back to the immediate satisfaction of painting an image on a surface, (in this case, a sheet of polycarbonate) placing it on the bed of the press, with a piece of paper face down, sending it through, then peeling back the paper to see what is there. Polycarbonate is an unsympathetic surface to work on, and the effects can be splashy, but as with all concentrated workshops, one seems to progress much faster than in one’s home studio, where email and the phone are constant interruptions.
An experimental monoprint portrait
I came back to Cape Town dying to make more prints.
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