Celia Wilson

January 2015 printing – Seeds and Seed Pods

By: Celia Wilson 5 January, 20155 January, 2015

Garden plants, Nature prints, Prints, UncategorizedAkua inks, chance, Plant prints on paper, plants, plate, Prints, seed pods, Seeds and seed podsLeave a Comment

Seeds and seed pods are really quite beautiful, make good subjects for art and design. This is a collagraph plate that I made ‘last year!’ in December from dried seed pods of the Honesty plant (Lunaria annua, aka Money Plant) and one of the plant’s leaves. I had kept the dried specimen from 2012, so it has lasted well. I glued the dried plant material onto a piece of mat board and coated front and back of the board in two layers of polyurethane varnish – but it still had a little warp. This did not make any difference when the plate was printed. (Or so it seemed to me…) A small piece of the leaf had already broken away in the past, but apart from an interesting phenomenon that appeared when I inked the plate (the layers of varnish came away from three of the seed pods) the plate has held up well through its various inkings and cleanings. The photo here is what it looks like, cleaned, after an afternoon’s printing with Akua water based ink.

This is a ghost print (i.e. second print from an inked plate) from one of the initial printings.

The next two images are of a print made by inking up a piece of plastic, sending the plate and the plastic through the press, and then taking a print off the plate. The plastic creates an interesting background with plenty of unexpected results which is one of the reasons I enjoy printing.

Finally, here is a the result of selectively cleaning the inked plate, so that only the raised parts of the collagraph will print. Still have a lot to learn! At least I now know that placing the paper on top of the plate creates an embossed image. The digital ink jet paper is dry and probably causes the creasing. I really enjoy using Akua ink as it is easier to clean up and I do not like using turps! The ‘black’ ink (actually a combination of colours, more a dark grey) creates an image that almost could be a photocopy.

I have been collecting Rocket (Eruca sativa) seeds from the veggie bed. Really quite fascinating, and I notice that the membrane between the two halves of the seed pod is similar to that found in dried Honesty plants. I would like to find Lunaria rediviva a perennial ‘cousin’ of Honesty which has yet another variation on this form with more elongated pods. [Just found out that they are all members of the Mustard family (Brassicaceae)!]

Finally, poppy seed pods from the garden.

December prints

By: Celia Wilson 27 December, 201428 December, 2014

Garden plants, Pottery, Prints, UncategorizedAkua inks, art, dyes on paper, environment, Plant prints on paper, plants, Prints2 Comments

A few prints, one produced at home, and the others at printing group.

This print is produced with Akua inks, on a smooth card, and I used my printer at home. The print is taken directly off some old wallpaper that came from my parents house. The original illustration of what I think may be a conifer is pale green, but here I used red and it suggests the NZ Christmas tree – Pohutukawa! I used this print to make Christmas cards for family and friends.

I’ve always had an interest in pottery, probably because of the glazes, but I really like the shapes of vessels and I am also presently researching cardial ware pottery. The next two images are of prints I made using a piece of flat, smooth polystyrene packaging that came with food from the supermarket (nice to recycle!). I traced the outline, cut the shape out and used a pointed etching tool to impress the marks. I am still learning, so it is helpful to have an image I can work up on a block quickly, then be able to concentrate on the printing process itself. I used two small pieces of polystyrene joined with masking tape at the back, and the marks and pits on the surface of the polystyrene helped to suggest the surface of clay pottery ware – as you can see below. I really think these printing block are artworks in their own right.

I found the cardial ware pottery image by Joanbanjo on Wikimedia Commons. The neolithic pot is described as decorated impressed ware, from the Cova de l’Or de Beniarrés, (5000 – 4200 BC) in the Museu de Prehistòria de València. I used water based printing ink and dry paper for these works.

Credits: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AVas_amb_decoraci%C3%B3_impresa_cardial%2C_Cova_de_l’Or_de_Beniarr%C3%A9s%2C_Museu_de_Prehist%C3%B2ria_de_Val%C3%A8ncia.JPG

By Joanbanjo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons from Wikimedia Commons

Finally from the garden, a photo of poppies for 2014 – red for love and tinged with white for peace.

I wish everybody a safe and bountiful 2015!

Leaf Prints from Glentui Valley

By: Celia Wilson 3 November, 20143 November, 2014

Nature prints, New Zealand native plants, Prints, Uncategorized, Watercolour paintGlentui Valley, Nature printsLeave a Comment

I am starting out on a printmaking journey. I have a new press, new inks and new paper, so lots of experimentation and not a lot of resolved or finished work just yet. I do enjoy the discovery of new ideas and methods. I have been been printing with two good friends, Ruth Stanton McLeod, printmaker and Sue Alexander, jeweller and printmaker, for about two years now, but it is quite daunting doing it all by yourself!

So, to encourage my artist into action, I thought I would post a few prints for scrutiny by the wider world – a sort of critique session.

I had an ‘artist’s date’ in September when I visited Glentui Valley to walk a Department of Conservation bush track, with the idea that if fallen leaves presented themselves to me during the walk I could collect them up and take prints – eco prints on paper or nature prints perhaps.

The leaves in the nature print below are three finely veined makomako or wineberry leaves (Aristotelia serrata), a small fern and a whauwhaupaku (five-finger Pseudopanax arboreus) with only three leaflets, it had lost the other two. I like the way the plant juice pressed out from the whau has contributed to the print – even providing its signature. The print was made with water-based ink, and if I had used oil-based ink I could have coloured the leaves with my watercolour paints. The paper was dry Tiepolo, 290 gsm, the ink was Flint. I have also just started to print on a ‘premium digital ink jet’ paper, 100 gsm, which is acid free but not sure if that alone gives it art archival status. With oil- and water-based ink you get a really nice print on the smooth ink jet paper, and it dries well. Good for tests!

Glentui-leaves I also used the leaves collected at Glentui for a paper steam – some images needed further work. I added in colourful plants from the garden, to take advantage of the spring flowers.

Eventually, these images were made into a book which I have just completed. The book’s cover is paper from a much earlier nature printing session when leaf prints were applied onto a sheet of paper coloured by earth pigments (Waikari green and an oxide brown-red watercolour). The nature prints in the book were made using oil-based ink, and were added on top of the steamed ecoprints.

As an experiment for this book, I applied the Waikari green paint to the black beech leaves, a Winsor & Newton blue watercolour to the primula flower petals and above them a touch of Indian Yellow, and pencil outlines were used to define some other leaves and flowers. However, the pink and grey marks on some of the sheets of paper occurred as I left the damp paper between plastic for a few days… Mould, ie! There is also a lot of colour transfer from the plants themselves through to the adjacent pages of the stack as it was being steamed.

The last page shown here, of two wineberry leaves, is a steam of leaves I had previously used in a nature print – hence the black impressions appearing within the colours of the leaves.

A good way to record a walk and the progress in using my new etching press!

Transported from old to new dye possibilities

By: Celia Wilson 26 August, 201413 July, 2015

Eco printing, Pigments, Uncategorizedenvironment, nature, New Zealand plants, plants, weeds4 Comments

It is now August, and I started this post in March… Time passes. It now feels like home. Seeds of a new beginning – seed pods of Wharariki, the New Zealand mountain flax plant.

Oxford in the early morning sunlight – Mt Oxford hills seen from the town.

At the beginning of 2014, a ‘sudden rush of blood to the head’ started a process that before you would have believed it possible landed us in another house in the same town within a month. It does not feel like a home yet, but we are settling our nerves now, coming out of the upheaval. People wonder why we did it, but the old place, gorgeous as it was, needed younger, stronger custodians than we could give. We thought it would take months to sell, but it happened almost immediately. I really miss the plants and the beautiful views; trying not to think too much about it. However, I’m finding new curiosities and opportunities and living in the town will possibly force us out to the wild places that we neglected. We really had a semi-wild place in the garden to keep us occupied.

Before we departed I managed to do a few solar dyes. Some of the colours from last summer were still in their dye pots, so I popped in swatches of woven wool – Viburnum tinus, Privet berries, and Hypericum perforatum seed heads. I also tried Rosemary twigs – lovely smell!

In early January I started a solar dye with flowers and another with leaves of Alchemilla mollis – the flower dye is below with a painted sample of the dye directly on the page.

In the dye jars, the yellow colour appeared almost immediately but I got a stronger colour from the Alchemilla flowers.

Another solar jar was gradually receiving – over a fortnight – red hollyhock flowers that fell off the plant. Previously I have steamed the hollyhock flower heads onto silk, and the colour was a bright pink, quite different to the result on wool.

The dried swatches as in my test book:

Feb-solar-dyes

One of the last photos I took at the old house. Althea that I grew from seeds. Will start again.

Snow in ‘summer’ along with high winds! This is the view that greeted us a few days after we moved house. Very dramatic welcome…

Our new house is just over one year old, like a doll’s house, and we have a garage full of stuff to be sorted, given away or reallocated somewhere. There is a lovely patch of weeds down the road – some old friends and some new rather ferocious looking ones too!

This knotweed is an old friend – and a walk in the park led me to some knotweed – Polygonum aviculare it may be – from which I have obtained a yellow. So there are possibilities. The knotweed below was growing by the footpath. I have brought some of the prostrate polygonum from the old garden.

Finally, a sentimental note. A move like this presents your belongings to you in a different light. You find things you had forgotten, and other possessions take on a new life. I happened to look through two Stanley Gibbons stamp albums that belonged to my father. The books are large and heavy, and lots of the stamps are missing, but not on this page, however. Towards the back of the book, this 15-year-old listed the number of stamps he had collected: on 10 March 1929 he had 1315. I read this on the 10 March 2014.

White Dog: an autogenic sculpture

By: Celia Wilson 17 May, 2014

UncategorizedLeave a Comment

Scientific Process Art!

Red Freesia Solar Dye

By: Celia Wilson 31 December, 201331 December, 2013

Solar dyeing, Uncategorizeddye bath, dyes, dyes on paper, solar dye, woollen fabricLeave a Comment

In November, when I was clearing the dead spring bulb foliage, I kept a few dried flowers from some of the freesias we had grown this year. The thought crossed my mind – I wonder if they will provide colour as the dried flowers were still orange-yellow. As you can see the freesia flower was a deeply coloured red. Below is a photo of the solar dye in progress. The colour appeared almost immediately. You can see that the stalk was still green, just the petals were dry and papery. Inserted in the jar was a piece of unmordanted folded woollen fabric.

The colour on the woollen fabric was rather dull, and seemed to attract a brown coloration on the fold. I noticed this also occurring at the edges of the colour when applied to paper.

A print book

By: Celia Wilson 31 December, 201331 December, 2013

Uncategorizedartists books, dyes on paper, eco print, handmade paper, Mark Lander, mordants, New Zealand plants, Plant prints on paper, Robert FrostLeave a Comment

Time for this has been scarce recently, so I thought I should try to get another post in before 2014.

Some of my eco prints on paper have been made into artists books. This one is a ten-page ‘concertina’ book. It is a little difficult to present these books; however, here is a scan of the cover and the last page…

The cover image is printed onto handmade paper by Mark Lander. The wood-block type of print (using a plastic block and a Dremel tool) was made in 2012. The pages each have a line from the poem by Robert Frost – Gathering Leaves – and I have written these words with ink from Harakeke, the New Zealand flax plant. The autumn leaves all come from our garden here in Oxford, and are a collection of prunus, oak, sycamore, cotinus, acer, pin oak and ash leaves – the coloured deciduous leaves all providing good elements for transfer to the paper which was dipped in alum first. The dark brown on the pages below is provided by a piece of harakeke seed pod.

Colours of Chance

By: Celia Wilson 25 August, 201329 August, 2013

Pigments, Uncategorizedantarctica, canvas, chance, coal, Dundee, pigments, River Tay, rust4 Comments

While in Dundee, Scotland, last year, we visited RRS Discovery, Robert Falcon Scott’s ship that sailed down to the Antarctic for the British Antarctic Expedition in 1901. Discovery is now moored at the Discovery Museum on the River Tay. Ernest Shackleton was also on this voyage and it was his first visit to the ice. More information on the museum’s website: http://www.rrsdiscovery.com

If you are in Dundee, it is well worth a visit!

The ship was a great place for artists, and a few things caught my (pigment seeking) eye, especially these black marks which are marks left by coal on the canvas shute as the coal was being loaded onto the ship.

This ship has been restored, and they left a portion as it looked before this work was carried out.

More stains and rust.

Colours from a Landscape

By: Celia Wilson 21 August, 201321 August, 2013

Eco printing, Eco prints on paper, Exhibitions, Organic paints, Paint making workshops, Pigments, Prints, Uncategorized, Watercolour paintart, dyes, eco print, environment, nature, Plant prints on paper, plants3 Comments

I am currently showing some pigment colour swatches at the Dunedin Botanic Gardens, and in October I am doing a workshop on making paint. This exhibition was facilitated through the Blue Oyster Gallery in Dunedin. Also included in the show are some natural pigments on paper – eco prints – and some raw pigment. The two artworks on paper show colours from Waikari (green) and Ashley Gorge (pink and green) in North Canterbury. Many thanks to Clare Fraser from the Dunedin Botanic Gardens who is in charge of the venue. I think the colours look fantastic presented on black paper against the lovely red walls of the Information Centre!

The pigment swatches each show a colour found at a specific location which is named on the swatch.

Appearing below are some of the photos I received from Jaime Hanton, Blue Oyster Gallery, Dunedin, who kindly photographed the show and installed the work for me :

This is not my anticipated installation for this show as the initial selection was stolen. My box was left on the pavement by the courier company and disappeared overnight. The items in this box were some of those in the photograph shown in the display case, bottom left corner. If, by any chance, they turn up, I would just love to have them back. They represent five years research, experiment and recording. I have given up hope of ever seeing them again, however, and will re-build as much of the information as I can… Worse things happen, and I ‘count my blessings’.

Shells were traditionally used for paint containers!

Eight Waters

By: Celia Wilson 9 July, 20139 July, 2013

Uncategorizeddye bath, dyes, eco print, environment, pHLeave a Comment

Exploring the Invisible –

This fascinating site has details of a new project with artist Sarah Craske that seeks to explore the nature of water – here showing the differences in pH of water collected from natural water courses.

Here’s the link – Eight Waters.