Elephant
By Chris Burns
Signed limited edition etching
20cm x 30cm
Edition of 100
£120.00
50 available
Limited edition of 50
Etching and dry point on 450gsm German etching paper
PPlate size:20cmx30cm
Artwork size: 34cmx45cm
'Kingdom' a series of etchings made from animal studies. The original ink studies were made while 'busking', living in a tent, in the South of France along the Cote D'Azure (on some kind of deluded Picasso/Fitzgerald pilgrimage). Tourist work in those areas was the well paid tax free, daily washing of the luxury yachts; but it is a culture in itself and it usually meant pleading from the dock with many others in need of work. My French was so bad, even simple jobs were out of my reach. I'm still not even sure why I was even there, my girlfriend and I had some romantic notion about the place but that was rapidly fading, we should have just moved on. So running out of money and ideas I thought I'd sell drawings on the street and decided to limit them to the subject of animals. I'd usually sit outside one of the various Picasso Museums, in Antibes, Vallauris or go to the so called artistic towns such as Saint Paul De Vence. More often I was chased away from my drawing and selling spot by the local shop/gallery owners who felt I was stealing their customers and they would usually call the police. I could still do a swift trade on a good day, before being moved on. I sold my drawings for 5 to 10 euros each and sold hundreds to tourists over a period of 6 months. I did take a fairly poor photographic record of the sold studies, but I tended to sell them before I could take an image and it was before good camera phones. Looking at the images of these works now, they seem like another persons work in many ways, but also feel like a record of a time. I would actually find it very hard to do these drawings again; they came from drawing the same figure over and over; yet each one that worked was a surprise, unique, relying heavily on accident mixed with a rote or repeated process. I liked the idea of pulling these images out of the past and recording them in a more permanent process, rather than the bad photographic record I had kept. These photographs might be blurry or low resolution but with the use of photoshop I could in part rescue them and produce a simple acetate, which in turn could be used in the photo etching process. I also made my own UV light box which tends to throw in happy accidents combined with the acid etching. I also like what print makers call 'foul bite' which is where the acid bites in the wrong places. Then I might work further into the metal plates with dry point and burnishing. I try and keep them as close to the original drawings as I can, but they do end up being pieces in their own right. Etchings by nature have a very physical feel to them, I think its why painters prefer it as a printing process and why it lends itself to this subject matter.