Reviewed Perspective

Angela Thorpe

I work on a Victorian Gothic press using limestone blocks in the traditional way. I am limited by the size of these stones. Lithography is based on the antithesis of grease and water: You draw on the porous stone with grease and provided that you keep the stone wet when you roll the surface with a greasy inked roller, the drawing will attract the greasy ink and the wet stone will repel it. After proofing the image, you can make the ink whatever colour you choose. I almost always use 3 or 4 colours to build up a print. The buzz comes with superimposing one transparent colour over another.

Mostly, the process it is about placing one colour beside another, one shape against another. Finding a subject is really only an excuse for that. I like John Updike’s “to give the mundane its beautiful due” and Carol Ann Duffy’s wish to “transcend the ordinary.”

Then there is The Moment. I have recently become very interested in The Moment as some sort of unexpected, unlooked-for coming together of things, in an affirmation. This can be expressed by a lovely pure colour, and the indifferent, dull, old world by some dark colour that gives the context, sometimes almost overwhelming it. I love the economy, the limitations of the print. More and more I like duality and paradox and using contrasting colours in juxtaposition.

Covid was a unique opportunity for us; no duties, no distractions, just precious time for the crafts.

I like to think I am a bit less cautious as a result, and have had a ???? look at earlier times in my life and have thought about poetry and Persian miniatures and I hope, at things that matter, while I can still just about lift the litho stones.” Angela Thorpe