Alan Stones

Self Portrait
Waterless Lithography: Toray Plate exposed with Drawing on True Grain Film
1 Run
510mm x 430mm
2002

Many of my lithographs have become really quite minimal, but hopefully, what they appear to lose in labour they gain in poetry. They work as metaphors, some with trees and birds standing for people. Couple depicts two trees on a hillside and South Atlantic two albatrosses in a vast open space. In more recent prints people are described more directly as in Still Water which shows two figures on a raft and in Journey which portrays five adults and a child loaded with bags, cases and instruments but again in an empty arena.

Plate lithography is the right medium for these images. Usually I make my drawings with Chinese ink on textured film such as Truegrain Film. The ink is water based and I am able to draw and delete endlessly until the subject has just the right ‘identity’ I’m looking for. Exposing the printing plate to ultraviolet light, developing it and finding the appropriate weight of ink are all variables which point up where the drawing needs reworking.

These activities might be repeated for days on end until I am happy with the result. Such minimal drawings would seem so slight and unintended if made in pencil or in charcoal, but gain in authority when printed.

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