The Movement in Her Marks
As part of Fenn Ditton’s recent contemporary printmaking prize, we were thrilled to choose Rachel Gracey’s lithographic print Following Marston Brook as our Pressing Matters award winner.
Drawing seems integral to your practice – can you tell us where your idea for a print usually starts?
I’m always looking, watching, recording, gathering information and ideas, especially from the landscape. When I become familiar with a place, I begin to draw and paint and I’ll use anything to hand – watercolour, gouache, felt tips, crayons, biros – whatever works to capture the essence of a place, the mood, the drama, the stillness.
We loved the movement in your painterly and expressive lines – can you talk a little about your mark-making?
For me printmaking has a wonderful way of simplifying my sketches, paring back what matters in an image and causing just the key marks, lines, blocks of colour to remain. Lithography is wonderful because if I’ve used a range of materials in my sketching, I can, mostly, replicate similar textures, washes and lines with tusche on my zinc plates. And then lithography will always surprise with added texture and alternative marks.
Your prints are pretty big and created on a massive lithography press. What are the ups and downs of working at such a large size?
I count it such a privilege to be able to work on a large scale. After sketching, I will create small prints. I see these as my ‘maquettes’ feeding ideas for the large work. I enjoy the making of these, but it’s when I am free to make large gestural marks and huge solid block shapes that I become totally immersed. It’s a challenge to roll the ink evenly, and many pieces get torn up, but the joy of peeling back a big clean crisp print is very satisfying.
Can you talk us through how you build up your layers of colour and why you navigate towards certain colour palettes?
I’ll start off with the colours used in my sketches. There can be a certain amount of planning involved in a nine colour lithograph print. And the mixing of each colour one week at a time as each colour dries, choosing how opaque/transparent to make them, how each colour will react and dry with another can take me several hours of mixing. But there is always room for experimenting and I love to play with colour, make mistakes, push boundaries and see colours create their own voice.
Whereabouts is Marston Brook and why did it inspire you to make this wonderfully atmospheric print?
There’s a spot on the riverbank opposite University Parks in Oxford where I will often sit. The day I drew this piece was very vibrant, the greens particularly verdant. I had been working on a series called River Notes and a number of prints had represented a great deal of isolation and lonely aspects we all felt the previous year or so. This setting, however, had a ring of optimism about it, of defiance and hope. I wanted to put down on paper the power nature has, and display in representation the driving force and resilience of the landscape. For it to have been chosen as your winning entry is such an honour. I’m so pleased you have enjoyed something of the joy of this piece. Thank you for awarding me this wonderful prize.