 Mae'n ddewch chi a dweud i'r cilyddai i'w arfer y cyfnod, i'r du bod iawn ni'n ddweud gwybodaeth ar gyfer y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth. Felly ym Eilton Posllwll, rwy'n meddwl i'w mwy yn rhai'r cyflwyng gyffredig ar y Pryddengelch. Felly yw'r pierdol i'r pelysiau gyda'u cas o ddylch chi'w gan y corffod ddau. Mae'n oed i wneud y organ lleol gweithneud o'r mewn gyfall, ac yng nghyddiadol yma, oherwydd mae'n gweithno'n gweithneud, The Mellon Centre has been committed for a number of years to a regular public lecture programme. In that respect, nothing has changed. This autumn, however, we've decided to mix things up a little by offering a more varied menu, which involves not just lectures here at the centre, but hands-on visits to museums, galleries, print collections and print workshops, interrogating a broad spectrum of themes and perspectives, historic, modern and contemporary. As we've noted in the introduction to the series of events, and I quote, Prince are multiple, yet individual, they're unpredictable, hard to regulate, often critical, funny, ephemeral, frightening, irreverent, angry, or just plain weird. They can be popular or obscure, sophisticated or clumsy, beautiful or ugly, and when not responding to market demand, repetitive and dull. This series will not be, however, repetitive or dull. It will be original and scintillating. In this respect, I'd like to thank my colleagues Rachel Prosser and Esby Bogus, the masterminds behind the series, as well as my other esteemed fellow melons, Siria Chatterjee, Martin Myrone, Anthony Tino and Doug Paul Freeman. As always, these events are open to all, terribly important to us, and no prior art historical knowledge is necessary. I do stress this, everyone's welcome to participate actively, so please feel free and confident to ask any questions that are important to you, and any knowledge or personal experience that may promote discussion, reflection and open up fresh perspectives. Now this evening we're fortunate to have with us two distinguished speakers. Ben Thomas is an art historian and curator based at the University of Kent, where he is a reader in art history. He's the author of Ed Gevint and Modern Art in Defence of Marginal Anarchy, Humphrey Ocean, and was curator of drawing together at the Courtauld Gallery, and co-curator of the award-winning Raphael, the drawings at the Ashburley Museum. Ben has published widely on prints and is currently writing a book on this subject entitled Multiple Histories and Big Plug. Ben's exhibition Poetry and Magic at the Italian Cultural Institute in London will run from the 7th to the 30th of November 2023, and contains prints, among other works, by Marcel Hansela. Marcel is a printmaker who, as she says herself, looks for ways to express those elusive questions of who and what we are when the mask is off and how we appear when the mask is on. The shock effects of her work lies in the contrast of combining her outspoken subject matter through the conventional medium of oil painting or etching. Her work is included in public collections, including the British Museum, the BNA, the Ashmolean, the Fitzwilliam, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, as well as museums in Antwerp, Aberystwyth, and the Hague. Just a word about the format of the evening so everybody's clear. It's going to commence with a PowerPoint presentation given by Ben. That'll last about 30 minutes. Then that'll be followed by a segue seamlessly into a discussion where Marcel's work will be the focus, and Ben and Marcel are going to talk together to one another about that. Then we're going to have up to 30 minutes, if we need it, or want it, of panel discussion and questions from the floor. That's this floor and the virtual floor beyond. We'll have a roving mic in the room, and that's going to be in Rachel's hands. Rachel's sitting at the back. Esmi sounds like a musical instrument. Esmi is on the Zoom chat box moderation. Last but not least, Doug, our very own rock legend, is in charge of livestream and technical support. Once we've finished our deliberations, you're invited to join the drinks reception in the ante room. That's those of you who are in this room. For those of you outside, you'll have to go and get your own drink. If you've got other plans, you can also leave the centre. We'll all be done and dusted by eight o'clock. On to this evening's main event. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Ben. Thank you very much and to everyone at the Mellon Centre and thank you all for coming this evening. This is going to be a really exciting series of events and the theme is printmaking for change. You're going to discover, if you follow all the events, lots of ways in which printmaking has challenged us to rethink the world. I thought what I'd do today, rather than try to exhaustively describe what states are, impressions or different techniques and so on, is just to give you some themes to think about, about why printmaking is intrinsically producing change, not necessarily intentionally, but is a medium that does this. I start here with a famous image by Abraham Boss, a mid-17th century French printmaker that shows the rolling press and also the communal process of inking and wiping clean and then printing the press, the prints from the Intaglio copper plate. So this is the bit after an artist like Marcel has finished etching the plate. And the word that I'm interested in here is figure. So the title is This Figure Shows You How to Print Intaglio plates. And so that sort of ties in with the debate in 17th century France about discourse, words in other words, words that describe things and figures or images, illustrations that show you things. And that's the first thing that prints do is that shows you very effectively information that otherwise would involve a long discussion. So I think you've all immediately grasped something of the technique of printing using a printing press just from looking quickly at this image. And this dialogue between figure and discourse, image and text, is something that goes on through the history of printmaking. I'm interested, for instance, in what happened when Giorgio Vasari published his great set of biographies in 1550. Suddenly people all over Europe could read about Italian artists, but what he got was people writing to him, like the scholar Domenicus Lampsonius wrote to him from Antwerp saying, I have no idea what you're talking about, it all sounds fascinating. I've learned Italian in order to read your book, but please could you show us some of these images? I can't just get on my horse and ride to Florence and look at the paintings that you're talking about. So the exactly repeatable pictorial statement that's brought about by printmaking helped in lots of ways to convey information. So prints are encyclopedic. John Evelyn talks about them as like a visual encyclopedia, a repertoire of images that can be exchanged around the world because they're very portable. So this is my theatrical moments, my notebook. Inside the pocket I have a little print by Wenzel Holler. So this is a 17th century print made in London by a Bohemian artist after a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, which is now in Windsor, and it shows what happens when people let their emotions become imbalanced, they start to develop slightly grotesque features. So it's a warning to us from the late 15th century by an Italian artist about remaining human conveyed by a Bohemian artist all over Europe in this tiny form. So it's a really radical technology, which brings me to my next idea, which is translation. So if the first idea was figures, translation I think is my other idea here. Slightly perversal, I'm showing you an original print by Claude Milan, so he came up with the image himself. So in what way is it a translation? It's translated from a drawing into a print form, and the detail shows you, Milan, as a very radical print maker, because this is what the French call a single cut in sole tie. So the engraver has only cut into the copper plate once. There's no cross-hatching, and it's all done by pressure to make the line deeper and wider, and that change in pressure conveys the changing tone and the changing relief of the things that are represented here, the draperies of a group of saints. So it's a translation into a coded visual language of lines and cross-hatchings, but it's also a translation in the, I suppose, the sort of etymological sense of translation, which means to take something from one side to another. So it allows us to take an image like the Leonardo and transport it somewhere else. So it's a translation into a different visual language, but it's also a form of dissemination. And dissemination is a type of analysis. So, again, the original word of analysis means to let something loose from its moorings, like a ship. If you were to untie a ship, it would be let loose. And by separating things out, we can compare them and analyse them. So one of the things Prince allows us to do is to make comparisons. I think art history sort of begins with printmaking because on a table top, you can start to compare different artists' work. You can start putting them together in terms of schools. It's around the time that people started arranging their collections of prints into the Dutch school, or the Italian school, or the French school, that we start to get some of the fundamental ideas about history, and it's really about how you organise your print collection. Other people would organise their print collections in terms of the books they had in their libraries. So you might collect portraits of all of the writers that you're interested in, or you might put images into your Bible. You might extra illustrate your Bible. So prints are a sort of time travel and also a form of armchair travel as well. You can start to learn about places you've never been to if you collect topographical prints, or images of archaeological digs, or landscapes from places you've never been to. I'm showing you here a sequence of views produced by a 17th century Dutch amateur artist called Jan de Bishop, who collected drawings from all over the place in order to create iconic images. He's created a canon of classical art. I like this quote from Bishop. He says, whatever I possess is of constant use to everyone, and the more its usefulness redounds to others, the more it brings pleasure to me. So there's a sort of generosity about doing this. I'm sharing visual information with a wider audience. But it's also a form of dislocation. So this is the Medici Venus, which is now in the Euphidsi, which originally was a cult object. Venus rising from her bath, simultaneously the universal image of love and beauty, and a vulnerable woman getting out of the bath being seen in a way which makes her cover herself in this pudica gesture. So what happens when you reproduce it from different angles against a sort of flattened, hatched background is that we are seeing a form of analysis. I like to think of printmakers as the original analytical philosophers. They are doing philosophical work in dislocating this sequence of views from the original object, and it's being spread around across Europe and the world. So it's separating the image from its cult status, and even from its image as a treasured object in an aristocratic art collection. And it becomes a sequence of detached statements, statements about antiquity, about female beauty, about canonicity in art's practice, about things that you could emulate or poses that you could use, gestures that you could appropriate. And all of these things, appropriation, emulation of so on, are encouraged by the existence of prints, thousands and thousands of them. The sudden abundance of images is something we take for granted in our digitally saturated world of images, but in the 17th century this is quite something. Another thing that prints do that provoke change is to reverse things. This is a technical fundamental that when you put that copper plate through the rolling press, the image is reversed in the printing process. You can, if you're clever, anticipate that and do a drawing that's in reverse that then is reversed back again, but just for the sake of time there seems to have been, and economies of scale, a huge acceptance of reversal of images in early modern Europe. We do see them occasionally in magazines. If you're a rock geek like me, you get annoyed at seeing left-handed guitarists when you know that they're right-handed in magazines where the photographs have been reversed. But reversal is absolutely pervasive in print culture, but it can also reverse meaning as well as the direction and orientation of an image. This is one of my favourite prints by one of the principal pioneers of a technique called mezzotint, which is a technique of printmaking that's very tonal and doesn't have any lines in it at all. You do it briefly by rocking the plate with a tool called the rocker. You go backwards and forwards over the plate until it's like a thick shagpile carpet. You ink that and it comes out very rich black. It's very boring for the apprentice that has to do it, hence off my rocker as the expression goes. Now this is a reproductive print and it reproduces and reverses this painting by Guido Ranni. Guido's painting exists in two versions. This is the one in the Louvre that I'm showing you. It shows drawing and colour, two aspects of the art of painting. In the painting, it's drawing who holds the position of honour, who has the right-handed gesture and who is signalling the theoretical primacy of drawing over colour. Druon drew on a drawing by Yanda Bishop who copied Guido Ranni in this lovely wash drawing, which is now in Turin, and then in copying that reversed the image, but also reversed the meaning of the image because in the mezzotint where there's no outlines at all and it's purely tonal, it's now the female figure that has the place of honour and it's colour that takes precedence over line. I'm interested in the fact that at about this time French theorists like Roger de Peel are starting to say actually it's colour that is what's distinctive about the visual arts. So reversals, that image was a very high art image with quite a theoretical content but there's a dialogue constantly between high art and low life to put it in Hogarthian terms in the print medium. Are prints really art? Does it matter? I mean, they're wonderful, rich images, but they're also multiple, collectible, cheaper on the whole. I mean, I found this in Portobello market for £10 a few years ago. It's a genuine original artwork but multiple. Some of my philosopher friends say, how can a multiple be an original artwork? Surely it has to be unique, the only one of its kind. Well, tell that to the print makers or indeed the sculptors. The beautiful road down Burgers of Calais down by the Houses of Parliament is no less original for being one of seven or eight lifetime approved versions and there are even more posthumous ones. But Hogarth here is satirising and playfully pointing to the distinction between high arts and the life of the street where we have a musician, possibly an Italian musician, unable to rehearse because of the raucous street noises that are coming from the London street. People sharpening their knives and singing ballads, honking on horns, calling out their trades and then the little boy peeing in the bottom, what could be less artistic? Or he may be contrasting Dutch art here with Italian art. Take that satire even further and we get someone like Cruikshank at the beginning of the 19th century. Here a parody of the statue of Achilles on Hyde Park Corner poking fun at the Duke of Wellington. And there's lots of overhead and possibly invented scabrous and funny comment. So prints because they are current and they can be produced rapidly more quickly than a painting for instance can serve as a commentary on everyday life. So they're very contemporary and they're heterogeneous. The production of images for patrons, notably the church in the 17th century or for aristocratic patrons often involves the artist getting a brief that they have to fulfil. Artists working with printmakers and publishers are often have much greater liberty to produce whatever they like and it's often not particularly decorous or respectful. However, we can think of the print making as an art form that can achieve sublime effects. I didn't realise I was actually going to be speaking in the same room as the wonderful James Barry prints. So these prints are among the largest prints produced in Britain in the 18th century and they were produced by an artist who was kicked out of the Royal Academy for being a radical critic of Sir Joshua Reynolds. And he also, according to William Blake, was reduced to living on bread and apples while painting the Royal Society murals which, if you don't know them, it's along with the Rubens paintings in Whitehall acclaimed to being London's Sistine Chapel. I think they're amazing paintings. But the prints are very interesting too, produced to keep him going really financially. But in the prints he was able to be freer in the people that he included. So it's a big painting of heaven and he got to choose who was in heaven to a certain extent. So it's a sort of pantheon of Barry's favourite people. And it's much more Catholic and Irish in the prints, much more radical than it would be in the paintings. So he's changing and constantly commenting in the prints. And the Blake, I'm showing you in terms of the idea of the sublime being reduced to a portable smaller size. So this is 20 centimetres by 15 centimetres. Yet he's managed to get Leviathan, Behemoth, God and the Heavens all into that small print. So scale is relative and it's possible to achieve sublime effects in printmaking. Or indeed strange, monstrous things that you might not have imagined seeing in a painting. The Goya etching is from his Los Capricios series. Very original, almost quixotic images that are exercises in caprice. So printmaking often associated with this idea of the capriccio, the spontaneous free exercise of invention. Drawing on perhaps folklore or idiomatic sayings in the case of Goya. And with Blake a very unusual print, this is a colour print where it's coming very close in scale and in its technique to painting. And drawing on all sorts of strange imagery is this Enitham on his own creation. It could be Hecate, The Goddess of Night, but it's hinting at sort of dark and sublime territory. Accelerating forward to the 1960s, I thought that these screen prints from the British pop art period illustrate the tendency of print to break the rules. So something like this wouldn't come in an addition. It would just be printed until the plate wore down and then the plate might be reworked and you might have thousands and thousands of them. And sometimes prints have two dates, the date that the copper plate was engraved and the date that the particular impression that you have was taken off that copper plate and they can be four or five hundred years apart in theory. And so to counteract that and make prints more like proper art, limited editions were introduced. Completely arbitrary, why produce just 40 or 100 instead of a thousand. It's to regulate and then also other rules like the artist has to execute the print. It can't have anything attached to it. It must be in certain defined techniques. And so artists like Kitai and Tilson who adopted the industrial method of screen printing, which is mainly, derives from basic poster printing. They systematically went about breaking all the rules. In the Kitai, for instance, we have a photograph of Picasso with a reproduction of the signature of Braque underneath it. It's obviously not Braque, it's Picasso, but the signature is also a copy. It's incorporated photographic materials including a certificate for legalized prostitution in France, which is a quite satirical comment about the artists that are pictured on the print with the other elements that Kitai has brought together and juxtaposed. So prints do break the rules and they also interrogate media. So this is a Richard Hamilton screen print which draws on some of the last photographs of Marilyn Monroe, the last photo session before her death. And Hamilton's interested here in interrogating photography as a medium by appropriating the images and incorporating them into screen print, but also incorporating Marilyn Monroe's own editing of the images. So the crosses are where she's saying not this one, though Hamilton is interested in the ambiguity of the cross because it could also mean a kiss as well. So it could be both self-harming marks and self-affirming marks. And then we get the approved one, given a pointing arrow in a tick by Marilyn Monroe. So there are two types of indexicality, if you like here. There's the photographic image where the image is created by the light that's reflected off the actual subject of the image. And then there's these marks that are made onto the negatives. Understanding media is the title of a famous book by Marshall McLuhan who famously said the media is the message, the medium is the message. And Hamilton is operating in that sort of terrain here in exploring the way in which photography works through screen printing. Is the print hot or cold as a medium? These are the terms that Marshall McLuhan brought in television is hot. It gives you all the information you need. Radio is cold. There's less information and it engages your imagination more. There is a chapter on printmaking in McLuhan's famous book. And we can find artists' mixing media in a very experimental way as a result of these developments in drawing on a wide array of different techniques. So this is a print, a recent print by Paul Caldwell, an artist I've worked with as a curator. And here Paul is using photography. He's using Photoshop to work on the photographic image. He's printed it using inkjet. But then over the top of the inkjet he has superimposed woodcut printing. So one of the oldest forms of printmaking, the woodcut, which basically operates like a sort of sophisticated potato print. But those blocks have been cut by lasers. So there's a real mash-up of different, some of the oldest and some of the newest techniques. And he's very interested in the surface interference that's created on the print. And prints have also, as a result of contemporary technology, moved into three dimensions now. So with 3D printers you can have 3D prints. And this is a work by Marilyn Oliver. I'm showing you here in the gallery in Kent, part of an exhibition that Marcel was part of too. The Female Newed Ways of Seeing. And this is a mobile really. So it shows two figures hanging from the ceiling as a 3D print. Which brings me to introducing Marcel's work, which in terms of technique is quite traditional. I hope you don't mind me saying that myself. It's etching and aquatint, and it's based on her extraordinary ability in drawing. And it's the treatment of the subjects that's really astonishing. So this is one that we acquired at Kent from Marcel's series, The Crying Game, which looks at some of the terrible things that are happening in the contemporary works. These are trafficked women. So rather like Goya, who I know you admire with his horrors of war, this is a contemporary witness to terrible things. And then a wonderful series of more recent work, which are a lovely form of reversal in that they're taking the apocrypha from the Bible and focusing on some of the rebel women that we know from the biblical traditions, such as the Queen of Sheba, who we see here revealing her hairy legs to King Solomon, Samson and Delilah, and Lilith, the Queen of the Night, Adam's first wife, according to certain traditions. So I'm going to end the PowerPoint there, and we're going to now have a conversation, Marcel. So, could you say something to begin with, just about the technique that you use in your printmaking? Well, because I'm a painter, I use a lot of layers in anything I do. So I do make a key drawing. I make a sketch and then sort of like to get a composition where I sketch this in pencil mostly, and then put a key drawing in a hard ground, and I have a first proof, and I have no idea how or where it is going, except the key drawing, of course, has to be more or less right, although I can add and often add other aspects to the original drawing. And then I'm going to build up by either sort of adding equity and adding more drawing, putting another hard ground, scraping, messing around. So, you know, a lot of printmakers have quite a good idea how the image is going to look, so they're more efficient, so that they do one or two bites or one or two stages, and then they got the print. A lot of my prints have maybe eight or nine stages before I think it actually works. And so, you know, they say, oh, you can't use that many aquatins. Well, you know, as long as you've got a plate, you just have to get it to stick somehow. So, and I think, you know, you can build up a lot of tonal value. It becomes much richer than, for my taste, a flat kind of pristine, more calculated print. I mean, I admire it, but, you know, it's not me. And you're both a painter and a printmaker, so one of the things that sometimes happens is that we think of printmaking as subordinate to painting in practice because prints often reproduce paintings and also in terms of some notional hierarchy of the arts. How do you feel about that? Well, I agree. I think in my heart I always think, oh, I'm a painter who also makes prints, but, you know, I am often, you know, or lately better known as a printmaker. I think that now there's a cross kind of a fertilisation between the two mediums, so things I do in printmaking are technically like scraping, like I also do this in painting. So, and Faisa, first I make a painting and then I sort of do make a print of it, but they're not exactly the same. They might have just the same subject matter. But I think one of the key differences for me is that because printing, or etching at least, uses acid, you know, and I absolutely love acid. I mean, you know, I love all kind of acid, but also really like nitric acid. And, you know, so the fact that you have something that sort of nasty biting into metal, you know, I mean, you know, you can dissolve a human body in it if you use enough nitric. And I think that is something really exciting. So the kind of destructiveness of the material, so it bites into very hard material, like metal, sort of like brings out a kind of cruel, kind of funny, black kind of sense in me. You know, sort of my images in printmaking are kind of harsher, rower, sexier, but also sort of, yes, they're just rower. I think that the material sort of makes that I have this giggly witch-like attitude with this painting I do not have to the same extent. Because at the moment you're revisiting some of the subjects from the rebel women's series as paintings. How is that working out? Well, I think, you know, that because I made the whole series 15 prints on the rebel women, and they're actually very rich subject matter in, I don't mean in a religious sense, because that's not really my interest, but really because they stand for, how to say, outwitting man. And I find sort of like, especially in these times, you know, where I think there's a lot of things about that, you know, the kind of moods about gender goes a bit in directions. I personally, I'm not crazy about, and I think wits, you know, to outwit someone and make people slightly looking with their egg on their face. I think it's a nice way to release the tension. You know, so, and I, in paintings as well, they have become, you know, that also that women why should to be in their femininity always be nice and sweet or model or whatever. You know, we have all these aspects maybe, to some extent, but also, you know, we can be, you know, bit manipulatively, bit efficient, bit of like, you know, just, you know, kind of bit of spice. And I feel that it's sort of very important to sort of like for the energy, in which it's sort of like, yeah, sort of, it generates energy in me, just making them. So I think I just want to sort of like activate that aspect instead of like the standard kind of presentation both in painting and prints about what women should be, you know, the whole, you know, doubt, you know, a sort of, what your identity is if you don't have the characteristics of the boxes. Well, it's a wonderful series and if you don't know it, this is the catalogue here. And you're often telling stories in which these resourceful women turn the tables on men and it's an interesting reading against the grain of the more authorised biblical stories. Absolutely, yes, a lot of baroque paintings. And of course there often the women are portrayed as the one, you know, the downfall of men like the lot and his daughters. Although Lot was really the bad guy in paintings like Kranach and all that. They are sort of the ones who are sort of the indecent ones. The poor father was sort of made drunk to have insist with his daughters. So I feel also that say, quite tongue and cheek, turning the tables on the standard kind of position. You know, like Eve, still is somewhere considered as a downfall of men. So my Eve is actually climbing out of Adam with spiky high heels and net stockings. Adam has a bit full of my God what is happening. So it's sharper but it's also I think a little bit absurd. I think absurdity is especially in a European tradition of printmaking like Rob's for instance or even Goya sort of like they use a lot of absurdity to make a point. So it is a more playful kind of medium because it is faster. It has a bite to it in more ways than one. So prints also play a part in your practice in terms of inspiration. I know that having visited your studio you have quite a few prints up in the studio. Beckman for instance is a beautiful example you have. Yes, I mean you know when I can or if there's something I really fall for I will buy prints. I haven't got space anymore for paintings and also you know that's out of my range. I really think when I start a printmaking which I've relatively started quite late then I actually discovered what a fantastic medium it is and so yes I have I still have a couple of artists I have my eye on because it's a bit like nails of a saint I mean I like a particular artist and then I have to find the right kind of work and to have in my surroundings. So yeah. So is there something do you think then about the printmaking medium that speaks to that side of your creativity the humorous biting non-conformist side of your art is that or is it all sorts of art that have inspired you in that respect or? Well as I say because my prints they seem to activate the medium a particular kind of side to me which I don't have in my daily life I don't really confront people at all you know but you know in my drawing I'm totally shameless and I find that sort of it's quite nice so you have an alter ego and it's sort of like so you know of course I don't want to be all the spirit people I can just draw them and by drawing them I sort of get that energy of being like that but you know I wouldn't sort of like I don't even know how to make a big knife for instance somebody gave me one of those Japanese cooking knives I'm done there to use it because I think they'll go totally wrong on my hands you know so I think what it is with prints also traditionally is that they have a rebellious kind of aspect it is sort of like getting people you know like if you look at Chinese for instance wood goods you know prints or in Mexico where they're pasted prints on the walls to start a revolution it's a very direct way to get people you know to transfer an ID to give people an ID to arouse people there's a lot of energy in prints it's very different than painting and you know it's not less or more it is just different and I find that quite exciting I think it's satisfied my side of stirring up a little bit of trouble you know and still I'm slightly removed of it it's just out there I don't kill the messenger kind of thing so yeah some artists I guess Kitai who we talked about earlier is one where the printmaking is is less serious than the painting for them as an artist but then it becomes more free in a way because there's less invested in it it's I mean for me it's not like his prints more than I'd like his paintings so there's a sense in which they're they're not as over determined as the paintings but I think you know sort of aside saying that you know things are absurd and all that rawness but also say like in the crying game I said my work has always kind of sort of seriousness underneath as well so you can but I think you know like say subject matter but partly because of the size partly because of the black and white that has a different touch also for the viewer so you have a in a way a greater loose freedom but I think you know you know you can also do things which are you know serious and subject matter but partly because of the size partly because of black and white a greater loose freedom both for the viewer and the maker imprint making then in painting you know because I'd say I don't really particularly like to paint genitalia I mean I really you know I don't but you know you can draw them in a quite you know nice and fast way it's just different you know you make just a line but you know sort of like I've seen paints with big genitalia you know it's not interesting you know so yeah it's different thank you Marcel shall we open it up to questions or show it I've got a couple of questions regarding the techniques that you use when you make your etchings so you use copper plate and nitric acid zinc and nitric acid do you I'm assuming from looking at your work that you don't like time your aquatint and just use one aquatint and like measure that the tonality by that it seems to me that you work much more intuitively and and you mentioned that you scrape things back and burnish and then reapply yeah all that for instance you know all the hair you know it has a hard ground bite but all the bite bits are just scraped away something you mentioned about the difference between painting and etching and I think the point that you were talking about about your techniques highlights this element of risk in the making of the etching plate and there's so much gamble in the process of making the plate I was wondering because you have to take such risks in your etching does that strengthen you or make you more bold in your painting no I think the risk factor in print making or in etching and painting is the same the only difference is really the body language you know it's painting a stamp and I do it mostly in the light in the daytime I don't work with electric light but with etching I sit down and they are often the images are conceived mostly in the night so they have a difference but really know in the risk taking of making the image now they are both demand the same demand the same there is no difference in that okay thank you oh thanks I was really interested I am really interested in how you came to start printing so was it in a studio was it in an academy or a school setting was it on your own finding your way I wondered when did you first encounter print making yourself print making is technically it's not really that difficult you just have to do it a couple of thousand times it's not really a painting is much more difficult but I had I knew someone who had booked a course of print making or etching really at Morley College this friend colony she couldn't go to the course because she had to leave London and you know I'm very fond of freebies and she gave me the course and I said anything free I will do it and so I did it and I found it incredibly frustrating I'm very irritating kind of medium and you know I have two tendencies if you either get straight and irritate and you walk out or you become so determined not to be beaten by something stupid like a technique that I just persevered and so it was really so I did the course I think for six months or something nine months maybe and then I did a three months BTEC and then I went straight to the studio where I work now which is Collector Studio and I crashed around till it worked so more or less self-taught and I really don't know anything about how to set the presses how to mix assets so I have very limited knowledge on toast techniques but in the meantime I've learned kind of a sensitivity intuitively to the medium so that is really the rest is somebody else can do really I've got a question online but questions in the room we will come back to you so one of the questions online is asking how does the place where prints can be seen matter to the message of the print I think that's for either of you It's quite interesting I really like sort of like over the last few years that prints are seen in public collections because people you know if you have say commercial kind of setting like a gallery or an art fair people look at prints really or at the work per se whether they can live is it you know whether they can afford it of course but also whether they can live is it and I've had a lot of times still hear this people say oh you know I actually love to work with how can't live is that you know so I think you know I think it's a little bit of a weak excuse but still that is what I hear a lot but in public spaces of course people feel not threatened by having to take that position if they can have it in their room and what will the neighbors say and so there is a much kind of openness for people who would never have these kind of things in their surroundings maybe these kind of images that they can really really look at it and get it impinged in them I did sort of like show in the Fitzwilliam Museum in the beginning of the year as I did in Antwerp in a graphic museum there and there were ladies who sort of like were in the beginning really shocked by the work and they said oh no I can't look at that and then later on they came back to me the how much you know when they looked at it again how much it sort of like really started to sort of work for them so I think so public space has sort of like people feel less threatened by the decision whether they can live with it in their personal space so I really like public spaces for that or somebody's house of course and I think that's very great but yeah It would be nice to see more prints on display publicly so if you think about national collections thousands and thousands of prints compared to how many paintings there are and I mean arguably the Tate's collection of works on paper is more interesting than the collection of paintings and yet we rarely see prints on display so that would be nice to see prints more regularly shown also they're probably less daunting whether it's in a workspace or in your own home or in a public space because they don't have that sort of enormous price tag on them so there isn't that feeling that you can't spill the coffee near the Leonardo Salvatore Mundi type of thing but yeah living with a print in your own home is a really experience because you do get to know it different moods different weather conditions different times of day and it changes and it grows as you get to know it and that's an experience that would be great to have with more valuable artworks but I think for most people the print is the art form where you can afford to buy a really good print it would be sort of like a hobby like following a football team or being interested in a sport like angling or something a similar sort of investment of time collecting trainers or what whatever it is so I think it is a form of art collecting that is within reach of people say on an average salary and it is very rewarding to live with an artwork definitely thanks so much I just wanted to come back to that thing that Ben you were saying about the reversal in printmaking because that was such a compelling idea I just wanted to ask myself whether that was something that you found to be like an important part of your work or how do you deal with reversal in your printmaking especially as you mentioned that you often do prints of your painting sometimes and how that interacts with that kind of process so yes but I don't do prints of my paints I will use the same subject matter and then think you know do it and print they are not a print of my painting it makes actually to me it is totally irrelevant that they are a mirror image because well yeah totally irrelevant because my images have nothing to do with an outer reality so you know think also what you talked about these sorts of 17th century prints were made say of a painting or of a sculpture and so they they were a cheaper version like say photocopy now they are going to have a photocopy of any kind of painting in your room but that was then the photocopy kind of way so it was maybe more you know more of an issue that it was reversed but you know my work is all you know in a world so really you know which way it comes out it makes absolutely a difference to me nice thank you you do get people copying prints that then reverse the reversal of the orientation and it goes back and forth it only becomes a big issue with left handed gestures so you can't have Christ's blessing with the left hand but sometimes things like accepting the the apple from Eve there are various games around that where it's soft and deliberate it's clear from where we have the original drawing that Eve is meant to be seen using her left hand it's not just the sinister hand as it were but yes apart from that there seems to be this huge acceptance of reversal in images we've just got two online questions there for you Marcella that you need to kind of put them together so someone was saying that you mentioned that you don't work with electric light and that prompted them to question if you go to bed when it gets dark and get up when it gets light no no I don't paint with electric lights because I can't see but if you paint in daytime then all the colours look different in the evening so no of course I work I'm a night person definitely and then there was another comment saying that your prints derive their visceral power from there not being too clean and they're wondering if you could speak to that right not to clean a subject matter or in execution I think they're saying in execution but you could speak to both well no it's not to clean a subject matter of course that is half the fun but not to clean an execution I do file the sides of my plates so there's some things which I think need to be needs I was like who's a wonderful print maker but he's rubbish his plates look like the sort of ratty kind of signs and he's terrible so I find some things need to be more or less pristine and all this doesn't matter so I don't have a pristine white on my plate because I use so many layers so the whites always have a little bit of foul biting which I find sort of adds for me I think it's really that's how I like it to be but also basically I'm not good in keeping anything pristine so I'm just I'm just yeah sorry so you've got a question sorry so you've got a question yeah I've got two things first of all Marcel do you have different reactions and different countries to your subjects and then I was also wondering if the Tate and other museums don't show that many prints why would that be so how is the reception and is it different in different countries maybe as well I think there is a sense that if people are going to come to a museum they need to see something special and very high quality and that perhaps there's a lingering prejudice against prints as multiples and also because they tend not to be coloured so black and white images tend to be seen as less interesting connoesership of prints can also be quite an off-putting thing it's always very tempting to start explaining things like prints and foul bites and this baffling the cabaret that comes with printmaking and yes to be honest some of the literature on prints is not the most inviting literature in the whole history of art so the writing about painting is often of a higher quality and so all of these things I think lead to prints being in my opinion the value does artworks I think it's mainly the multiple thing but there are these other other factors too this museum is the only one who shows prints continuously I mean I have brilliant I mean I have a print room where you're not a print room I mean just to encourage people to go to print rooms I mean you can email the British Museum a great print room Tate has a wonderful print room I spent I think three very happy hours looking at William Blake drawings just after Christmas and I had the place to myself so it does involve a little bit of planning but there is no better way really of looking at art than being in a print room on your own and then bringing you a big box of things to go for it's a bit like Christmas if you love art and it's not like shuffling round a blockbuster exhibition where with the best one in the world that's not the best conditions in which to look at art just actually also two things one observation and one question for myself but the quick observation is speaking of places public collections that don't seem to be showing prints all that often the new renovation of the National Portrait Gallery has actually been incorporating prints in dialogue with their paintings which they never used to do before but also they've got this one room dedicated to print making where they also have like a video and like played showing how to make aquatint and mesotint and I thought that was just a really amazing sort of starting point for this kind of I suppose a revolution to showing more prints and making people more aware of it so I just wanted to follow up on that basically but for myself you mentioned sort of drawing quite a lot in your process and you know we all know you from your etchings and aquatint and I've always seen etching as a draftsman's medium and I was wondering whether you had also been interested in other types of techniques like say for example lithograph which is also quite drawing based as well I have done a little bit of lithograph lithography but you know there's two kind of things that no one knows about it for me first of all those stones are a real pain they really are they're heavy and they're cumbersome you can't take a mission and sort of work and they sort of stay flat so you cannot put them upright or at different angles well not easily at least but secondly what I dislike is that you have to print the whole edition of it which mostly you sort of print your edition while this etching I have an edition of 30 but I only print two or three and later print another three and they'll be exactly the same but most of all I find with lithography it's not as free to work in layers as in an etching plate an etching plate you can really you know if you slightly stick within some kind of basic principle of what then you can really do whatever you like add layers and take them off and add and you know really make a tonal value from 0.0 till 100 you cannot do in lithography I find you know the kind of like the grey tones are much more limited in lithography than in etching and say the whole sensuality which you also get in painting you have this everlasting tonal values which I find really exciting you do not get in lithography so yes the line is beautiful but yeah for me then practical came down the weight of the stones and the fact that I had to print in addition I've done a few lithographs they're okay but you know I think I would need another 10 years really to be good at it and I have got another 10 years no you know because you know I've also etched some paint and you know I will be sort of in a Zimmer frame you know if it's in 10 years no you know you have to be realistic about things so to be that good you know 10 years minimum and it will be a puzzle not well next life just to come back to this question of prints being on display and ideally more prints on display only because it hasn't been mentioned already prints are light sensitive and can't be on permanent display in galleries and in museums unlike paintings and unlike other media so I'm really glad that you've both already invoked study rooms and how critical they are to the study and access to prints but following up on Nigel's point I think the challenge when we're talking about the sort of the display and access to prints in gallery in museum spaces is they require particular lighting conditions that might be different from other media so if they're mixed media of course you know you are well aware of these constraints to works on paper but I think the general public is often not aware of these sort of challenges to displaying works on paper I'm heartened that recent rehangs and re-installations sort of take up that challenge and it has been done brilliantly in some exhibitions but that is that is a sort of challenge and sort of I don't want to say limitation but consideration to to displaying works on paper because earlier in your talk Ben you mentioned popular prints and kind of satirical prints and sometimes the sort of curation of prints there's something so wonderfully ironic about putting a brilliant mount on something that would have been kind of crumpled up and pasted on a sign post or something like this so I think the kind of museum aspect of prints is the sort of yet another dimension to what's been sort of discussed here but yeah just to say the sort of the light sensitive aspect to it and I think what's fascinating about the way prints are displayed in museums and galleries is that technique is always part of it and that's not true for other media it's almost as if you can't really display a print without discussing is it an etching is it a lithograph and so forth and what does that mean for how the image was constructed or how the image was made can I just say something because personally I find that I like that sort of vision print image that you see the technique you know what it is made for but you know I think people are much too sort of hung up about technical aspect of printmaking you know I mean painting has a lot of technical aspect nobody talks about that and I find you know people sort of say technical aspect is a technical aspect you know just look at the image the end result is really what it is about and if I sort of meet a colleague and I say oh how did you get that black and I say oh do this and this and that you know you have shop talk but otherwise I find you know the too much technical waffle really takes away from the impact of the image it is about the image the end result you should not see the technique you should not see how difficult or how clever it was to get that result and now I am really serious and passionate about not to sort of stick on the cleverness and the skill because that should not be visible but should be apparent is what happens to you when you see it you know when you see an attractive man or woman you are not going to think about the creation process of the divinity are you just sort of that is all what it is about and I think this print Megan is a bit too much hammering on about say the technical process you know so sorry I have a bit of a bee about that obviously clearly sorry yes I agree with that too it is a constraint and of course you are absolutely right about the light sensitive nature that does not mean that you cannot be constantly changing displays within the constraints and also what we have is a result of collecting and so if you think of the millions and millions of printed images that must have existed I forget which book it is but there is one of the standard books about print history which says we have all seen a Rembrandt etching but who has ever seen a Victorian matchbox and so the Victorian matchbox must have been one of the most common printed images and they have all been thrown away I think Peter Blake maybe saw one because he tried to recreate one in one of his artworks but the huge amount of ephemera that has gone and also the I'm assuming I didn't really stress perhaps enough was the the beautifully international quality of the print market so I was once invited to participate at the edges of a research project called the British Printed Image and one of the things that I was slightly worried about there was that if you went into a print shop on the strand in the 18th century or the 17th century even more so most of the images would have been Flemish or Dutch and then they would have been French and then they would have been Italian and then a very small proportion of them would have been made by British print makers so what do we have is it representative what we have probably not I mean how rich things must have been but how much of lesser quality has survived I mean these judgments of quality are partly the result of judgments that our ancestors have made about what's worth preserving and what isn't and occasionally you get these wonderful chance discoveries of I mean there's the famous one of the ship caught in the ice which has got lots of there were lots of prints there that showed how much more diverse and rich the image repertoire was at the time but I'm heartened to hear that things are changing I haven't been to the national portrait gallery yet but thank you this is fantastic I have to say and I said as you all came in and I mean this in a very positive way I was so pleased to see so many faces of people I didn't know because sometimes and I've been here a while you know you go oh it's a usual suspect you know they always come to everything but actually it's very nice to have to feel that people are here because they're responding to a particular you know subject and a presentation and I think it's very lively you know it's so difficult isn't it to be cut and dry with prints versus painting and all these different things are thrown in in my own area of interest is particularly the 18th century and it's even there it's kind of you know sort of you know different ways of thinking about it the reproductive print makers medicine makers fantastically skilled individuals who spent months and months and months I'm thinking of people like William Peather who reproduced right of Derby's paintings they are in every sense as remarkable as the oils on which they are based and the skill factor is just of the scale you have to be trained to do this and the drudgery and the pain and it being off your rocker and all that sort of thing but then said against that you've got people who are equally skilled at print making who are incredibly inventive and two of my favourite print makers are William Blake and Thomas Buick he's an extraordinary man extraordinary philosopher, extraordinary artist not a member of the who doesn't have any time for the Royal Academy and produces these tiny little woody engravings on blocks which are exquisite but the imagery is also and the thought process and his engagement with the natural world is exquisite and Blake and Buick on one side is quite different because Blake's art is coming principally out through filtered through his imagination and Buick is very much filtered through the exterior world but I would never think of them print makers versus painters there are artists and I think that's the thing is that print makers are I think of them first and foremost as people who make art Hogarth another great hero of mine who is a great painter a great colourist often underestimate how fantastic he is as a painter but of course he starts as an engraver because basically he he can't afford a painting trainer he's people always say he was apprentice to a very ordinary engraver well he wasn't he was apprentice to a great a great engraver he worked with people who engraved on plate and that in itself was a great skill plate because we talked about paper we talked about paint but making images metallic surfaces because that's all kind of bound up together the other amazing thing about William Hogarth is of course he invented those narratives were his invention and that's the extraordinary thing everything came out of here the great narrative series but at the same time he realised that there were individuals who could probably do certain things better than he was and when he was doing Margella mode he went to France he tucked one of the pictures under his arm he went to Paris and he went there because he needed to find guys who could do it and the French were really good at it and so he went and found French engravers because he just knew that they had a skill base that he simply couldn't find here and so I think that's what I'm banging on about to me it's a kind of homogenous I don't, you know because when we were thinking about this very series we finished the series last autumn in conversation with a few colleagues and somebody, it was actually Esther Chadwick at the courtel principally he said, why don't we do something on printmaking and at first I was thinking oh yes, painting in the middle printmaking on the side let's do something marginal I got my wrist slap for that because it's not marginal and it's not a marginal activity but as you say going back to the print room thing it's marginalised because there's not that access the BM just across the road that print room does exist you can book in, you can get a box of works on paper out and you can spend a I tell my son this he's in his twenties now he's doing sculpture and I said look mate you can go in there and you've got just as much a right to be in there as anybody who is an expert because it can get a bit of feat there's no doubt about it about proofs and states and who knows what and then the value thing comes in and so lots of regional museums have print rooms they have great print collections are the Colchester recently stacked up to the ceiling with this stuff but they can't even but cataloging them even even knowing what they've got is a problem because there's not the investment in knowing what they have gosh I've gone on a bit there but that was really good I really enjoyed that so multifaceted so much for giving your thoughts and sharing your knowledge and expertise and also to everybody else and what you've brought to it this has been a lovely evening and hey it's 25x7 so I think at that point I'd like to formally thank our speakers again and then we can go