ARTIST
Angela Thorpe
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Works
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Biography
Angela is an artist based in rural Shropshire who makes limited edition lithograph prints on a Victorian press. Her images are based on observation, memory and imagination.
Artist statement:
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 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 and more and more I like duality and paradox and using contrasting colours in juxtaposition.