I think of drypoint in terms of braille and excavation

June 1989

I did my first etchings in 1981. As at the present time John Loane and I have gone on to do 160 or so. Prior to the etchings I had done some photocopies of gridded golf portraits. From the first the print medium came as a great relief to mo. I felt as though for the first time in five to six years, I was somehow or other constructing some distance on the miasmas of the drawing process. It is not easy to describe the significance of this process of displacement but I think it answered the impulse in many of the large drawings to overdraw or scrub out the self portrait image. So from the first I sensed this conceptual distance within the process of etching, but unlike the photocopies I was able to still retain a very inflected, responsive line. I don't like to think of this shift in the process of drawing as one of 'translation' because that implies for me a particular relationship to the original whereas the etching process while attenuated in its relationship to the impulse to draw is nevertheless in my experience a producer of primary images.

Fine distinctions such as these are the key to my attitude to drawing. I think of the self portrait as merely a container or a territory, the real contents are in a sense transgressive of it. I am more interested in expression as a product of process than in traditional concepts of distorted contours. Therefore the mode of production of self portraits is important. For long periods I will work directly from photographs, with varying degrees of obsessiveness, from gridded up images to free copies. Often such periods of containment will be followed by sessions of drawing from memory. I am interested in the involuntary processes of memory distortion. The work of the last year has been done working from the mirror and every day during this period I have worked for a couple of hours. This alternation of working methods is understood by me in a purely comparative way since I regard the whole idea of the likeness as essentially fictional. So I use a 'likeness' originating from different primary images and the comparative importance of the sources is that they help ‘boundary' a territorial, interpersonal, psychological and social sense of the self image. Print making has added a very particular layer to this process.

The self portrait images of The Pool of Blood (in the Block portfolio) double this sense of displacement characteristic of the print technique since each image recapitulates via memory drawing, copying of a memory drawing, copying of the copying of a memory drawing onto hard and soft ground and then etching and print an image whose essential sign is one of loss and degradation. It is 'loss' and 'degradation' that is in this case the truly visible self image.

Because I think of the mark as a kind of system or else as a parallel impulse, a process to the 'likeness' I also regard the raw plate as a kind of image in its own right as the essential ground of the self portrait project. Consequently I treasure the inadvertent scourings and imperfections of the surface. This 'foul bite' or 'noise' seems to me to be the crucial 'other' of the self portrait image one that collides with it and endistances [sic] its residual self regard and coherence. 'Foul bite/ noise' is then a truly formative dimension. It is this aspect of absolute transgression, pathos, estrangement that collectivises my project so that the self portrait project becomes a kind of absolutely open or provisional image of 'everyman'. In all these ways the process of working on copper and zinc plates has become absolutely central to my activity as an artist. In recent times I have begun working in drypoint. The difficulties and the directness of this method have begun to completely re-orientate my most fundamental ideas about drawing. I particularly enjoy the problems of 'seeing' that the technique entails … since this problem of visibility precipitates anew the question of what the self portrait represents or defines, I think of drypoint in terms of braille and excavation. It is as though the self portrait is already imbedded in the copper ground. The physicality of the process is also extraordinarily complete since it is hard to distinguish in one's response between an impulse to extract a contour and one that is attacking it. I also had the same feeling about putting hard ground plates into acid.

January 1990

Drawing always occurs for me as a kind of relief to the processes of analysis and yet it is in direct tension with them. At the end of a drawing period certain things become glaringly clear. It was only after an extended period of drawing in the early eighties that I could begin to fully understand the heads as decapitated. From the outset I had been theorizing about 'photodeath' and the relationship between the traditional perspective space of the left side with its photographic head trapped in the web of the grid and the right side with its eruptive contents. The sudden emotional flash of 'de-capitated' brought the two sides into direct collision and the body was born as it were as a blur of energy and smearing that directly invaded the formalized space of the head and overwhelmed it.

This is a very simple realization but my drawing and etching proceed in this simple fashion. I am particularly interested in the moment when such contents and the meaning of their form become apparent to me. It is my understanding that the drawn contour is always in tension with repression (and not only in my drawing because I think of it as an a priori given). It may well be why I derive such relief in recent years from processes of drawing from direct observation since direct observation seems to enable one to directly measure and control repression without exacerbating it (drawing and thinking at the same time), but the basis for my major drawing remains fixed in certain attitudes to construction and conceptualization where tension and repression are maximized and where oppositional forms and states are forced together. It is a process of deliberate damming up, I realize that now, to maximize the force of energy and flowing and I am always imagining a new spatial expansiveness and a kind of torsion that can free forms and create a new way of thinking about them. This is the sense of the drawing session when I engage with the process of drawing as a deliberate act of self transformation, but at the same time it is important to stress that this is not Expressionism in the old sense since the installations and the abstract sculptural forms in precarious balance made in recent times are direct outcomes of it, distilling and focusing the trajectory of the forces as well as their psychological meaning.

This is why I find it necessary to continually shift vantage points as it were within the drawing process. Why a series of drawn self portraits from photographs are turned into laser copies and why the laser copies as a distinct work can then become the basis for new drawings, or the relationship between prior drawings and the memory image, or that between the image done from a mirror and its re-drawing on a copper plate which causes loss of image. I experience this loss intensively as the form of a new image. Loss, displacement, repression, is a crucial connection between these dimensions that enables me to investigate drawing in the most fundamental way. These remarks are the background to all aspects of my drawing and unify if you like, or rather consolidate a relationship between my drawing as such and my work as a printmaker. I am not a painter simply because drawing mobilizes the depths of both my thought and my feeling. In addition, I value the openness and provisionality [sic] of drawing which exactly grasps and emphasizes the movement of both thought and feeling and does so in a way that is more complex … it than may the explain highly the schematic process of abstract thought… it may explain the strange hiatus between drawing and abstract analysis and yet my drawing is continually subjected to conceptual re-organisation.

I have now reached the point where large drawings are being produced in tandem with large drypoints and etching. That is happening right at this moment. Energy and ideas are continually flowing between one medium and the other. Across the paper I work at great speed. That facilitates a particular kind of resolution as well as a particular kind of content. Formally the large drawings on paper allow me an extreme disjunctiveness [sic] at this stage. I use the extreme tension of forms not only to dam and break repression but to fundamentally re-organize my understanding of the figurative since the form of heads and bodies is altered to reflect and amplify the jagged rhythmic flows of the whole drawing. It leads me to say that figuration is always a form of managed repression even when drawing is at its most seductive. In contrast to the mobility of the work on paper the difficulty of 'seeing' the image to be particularly stimulating since I work directly. But loss of image, the sheer physicality and 'damage of the lines and in the large drypoints the overdrawing across images and plates to excavate a compositional field, is in direct contrast to work on paper. It is as though at every instant I am identifying, isolating and examining every aspect of my facility, as though the drypoints amplify and drag out of me the contents that I draw over on paper. To use the etchings in this way is for me one that makes the category of printmaking irrelevant. I hope I make myself clear. It is not some sort of iconoclastic relationship to printmaking, what I am really talking about is the meaning of difficulty or better the contents that difficulty facilitates and of a direct relationship to materials as though materials embodied the objective correlative of repression. Drawing fascinates me because of what it can't say a certain de-emphasis or minor position in relation to major forms such as painting. The same applies to the prints. But reduction of means, limits, difficulties, tension the aphasic field. The major position of painting exacerbates concealment, style, de-personalization. The important thing to remark though is that none of this is a problem of scale. Bigness certainly does, accentuate the problems of painting (as they concern me), but big drawings are more simply and recognizably a problem content.

Mike Parr

February 1990

The project of making prints with Mike Parr has become increasingly involving and demanding since we began years ago. The sheer volume and scope of work that has together in that time is, I think, remarkable. It demonstrates that printmaking has now become an essential element of Parr’s work.

The division of labour in the process of making this work is clear: the artist is free to draw or construct images on plates while the printer takes care of the technical aspects of plate-making through a proofing and printing of editions. The other more subtle aspect of the collaboration is that it requires a commitment and understanding on both sides as to exactly how to proceed at each turn.

Subsequent to the earlier, more conventionally acid-bitten plates, Parr has used several techniques. In particular, it seemed to me that the dry-point needle would be an appropriate tool for him to use and one with which an equivalence could be found to the obsessive and gritty nature of his drawing. The carbide-tipped needle is pushed and pulled to gouge up a heavy burr of copper on which to trap the stiff ink. While Parr was initially reluctant to use the needle, finding that the resistance of the copper to the needle seemed to impede the drawing action, the first large drypoint proofs were an immediate revelation. The technique had in fact proved to be particularly appropriate to the kind of images that were produced.

Later on Parr came to use a diamond-tipped needle as well for the lighter passages of drawing and in some instances used an electric angle grinder to dig more vigorously into the copper. My interpretation of how to print these plates was to leave a strong and irregular smear of ink on the surface of the plate when hand-wiping so that when printed as plate-tone the whole effect is one of an intense psychological moment.

Parr has not wanted to venture too far into printmaking processes as such. For him the impulse to direct drawing action is paramount. This is, I think, the best approach.

The images have been constructed not only through etching and drypoint but also at times with brush and lift-ground, as in the Opic lland and Language and Chaos sets. Open and foul bites are used in conjunction with drypoint through the Gun into Vanishing Point series, while the two woodcut series of self-portraits are inked simultaneously in relief and intaglio, so that the image is made extremely dense.

These and other methods will be used as required with future work. Parr continues to be committed to producing what he considers to be 'primary images' in the printmaking medium. I look forward to assisting in the further elaboration of this significant body of work.

John Loane