David Kirk - Portraits from Art History - Drypoint Etchings - GOLDMARK

So I'm David Kirk, artist and printmaker as well now. I suppose I've been busy in the print room recently producing a series of pictures which look like an art history quiz which is ongoing of details of famous paintings and some of these faces you'll probably be able to recognise but I've zoomed in on various faces in art history, some self-portraits, some Madonna's, other characters in other paintings and so reinterpret them in dry point and dry point is etching but it's not using any acid it's just scratching into the plate using a series of lines which then is so it's intaglio printing so you clean off the plate and the ink is retained in the lines which are recessed into the into the plate itself. So these are these are reinterpretations of various paintings. Velazquez lends himself especially to these sort of faces because he was the most extraordinary portrait painter. Years before photography he was able to capture a moment, this one's actually a detail from a painter called the Topas, so there's Bacchus sitting to his left and they're all drinking and this is one of his companions but capturing that smile I think is amazing, it's an amazing face from art history that's worth studying. And then you've got another Velazquez here of King Philip IV, less attractive I think Velazquez was probably up against it trying to do portraits of the Spanish royal family to make like normal human beings. Oh there's another Velazquez here which you probably recognise it's Pope Innocent X, the famous portrait by Velazquez which shows such insight into the man's character because he just looks suspicious and devious and of course he's supposed to have said after Velazquez finished the painting it's too real, in fact he'd sort of seen something that he wasn't meant to but it's also the inspiration for Francis Bacon's Screaming Pope but this one he's not screaming. So you probably notice these colours in the prints and this is a technique called chine collé which means laying tissue paper over the print just before it goes through the press and the image is printed onto the tissue paper and the tissue itself melds itself into the slightly damp paper so that is actually tissue paper which has become part of the white sheet. So you can do several things, you can do different colours of tissue paper or you can get patterned tissue paper and run that through, this one you can probably see has gold flecks in and that is the head of Manet's Olympia which caused a great scandal in 1863 when it was painted because she was naked. The gold flecks have kind of transferred to the paper along with the actual tissue paper so you can see the background isn't quite white it's the tissue paper or you can simply tear the paper across and print that and this in fact going back to that Pope that's a slightly uh that's a handmade Japanese paper which has then melded through so not a tissue paper but a 30 gram handmade paper. Here's some more this is on silver this worked quite well it worked on a on silver paper oh this well this this is actually Van Dyck this is the Van Dyck self-portrait so I've zoomed in really close on on him to produce several different colours. I quite like the idea of artists themselves looking out at you and you looking at them and then reinterpreting in different colours and different techniques. The interesting thing is that you don't know till it comes out of the press what they're going to look like because you can't quite see when you're making a mark on the plate you can't quite see the image you have to get it in the right light to see where your scratched lines actually become black so you need to reflect light off the print so you're constantly moving it around to see what the image will look like you never really know until it comes out of the print you peel back the paper and reveal a print and some I might say some haven't worked I think and so I've sort of discarded those and said that others are surprising sometimes think well that's not going to work and suddenly like this one I thought well I'll have a go you know very close up with a lot of dark on the right and left and a big area of cheek in the middle but it suddenly as it came out of the press I thought oh it has worked so I think that is probably my favourite so far although this one by Velázquez has a huge amount of animation in and I had fun doing the teeth and the smile because it's just a moment in time isn't it which is an extraordinary image so Velázquez I think is I think one of the painters ever really so I'm doing a sort of homage to his work really in a very modest way Goldmark Gallery stock my paintings which are quite detailed slightly magical in oils and acrylics but this is something quite different I don't think people would necessarily realise straight away that they're by me or in my style I'm having quite a lot of fun doing something a for a while and producing an ongoing series of prints of famous paintings and then it might lead into other things I think there might be other images that will come into the prints so I think this is only the sort of the beginning