Brenda Hartill R E is a British painter / printmaker based in a Victorian warehouse studio in central London. Much of her working time is also spent in her studio in the Andalucian mountain village of Gaucin in Southern Spain, and on visits to the wilds of New Zealand where she was brought up.
Her work explores the texture, pattern and light of landscape, and ranges from finely drawn figurative works to bold, heavily embossed abstract images. She is most interested in the strong light and shadow of Southern Europe, as well as remote New Zealand, and the London cityscapes.
She works in watercolour, oils, collage, and mixed media, as well as etching and collagraph, the limited edition print techniques for which she is best known. She prints and publishes all her works from her studio in Southwark, with the help of her two printers, Dee Leydon and Anna Bridges. She exhibits in over 50 galleries worldwide particularly in Britain, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and has over 250 prints in her portfolio.
Brenda Hartill is a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (R E), showing regularly at the New Academy Gallery, Windmill St. W1 and the Bankside Gallery, London (next door to the Tate Modern), and She often shows in the RA Summer Exhibition and the National Print Exhibitions in London, as well as many mixed shows countrywide. Her work is in the collections of many large companies , including BP, Bank of England, Global and BT, and her work is sort after by art consultancies, interior designers and architects worldwide.
Etchings and Collaged etchings with carborundum
Always with my work I like to allow the medium to dictate to a large extent the direction that I follow. I am a great believer in lateral thinking, and with my etchings I work on the metal plate, "going with the flow", keeping an open mind, and "riding" the happy and unhappy accidents that occur along the way. I also like to use the action of the acid very much as part of the creative process, and my recent themes of elements in the landscape-erosion, structure, water flow, texture and universal forms, are a gift to the process of etching .
To retain maximum flexibility I often work on many small plates at a time, and the final images develop out of collaging the contrasting elements in juxtaposition. The etching/carborundum series, "Fractured Earth", and "Broken Land", are developed in this way. The theme of the fragility of the earth grew from the earlier "Hot Rock" series, and my visit to New Zealand in 1995. The land is crisscrossed with dramatic reminders of very recent earth movements, thermal activity and earthquakes, which is less obvious in older landscapes, where erosion takes over. In New Zealand there is always a sense of underlying danger, of the possibility of cataclysmic changes to the landscape and our lives. Now we have global warming and a sense that man is dramatically, perhaps irrevocably, affecting his environment.
The latest collaged etching / carborundum work, explores the theme of chemical reaction and erosion. "Silver Meltdown" was developed from a plate that had accidentally been immersed in pure nitric acid, then the dynamic and eroded forms which resulted were cut and reworked. The addition of silver leaf for "Silver Meltdown" developed this idea, which led to the "Alchemy" (where I used pure gold for the first time), and "Metamorphosis" series.
To create the collaged works I collect a large number of plates together with images, textures, vignettes, cloud formations, land formations, rock and plants forms etc. This is the basic material I work with, and I then begin to formulate, compile and distil my images by collaging the plates , cutting them, reworking them with acid until I eventually glue them onto a steel "base plate" . In these latest works I have sought to emphasize the forms by isolating them in a sea or pool of deep dark colour.
After trying many methods to achieve the intensity of colour I required, I found that by applying glue, and then the fine grit carborundum around the collaged images, I was able to get the sense of infinity, depth and space I was looking for. Each of the plates is then inked by hand, the carborundum areas absorbing a great deal of ink. I found it necessary to mask this surround out while inking the central area as the etched plates are subjected to several layers of ink, firstly with the "intaglio" ink (the first application which sinks into the deepest crevasses of the often heavily embossed metal). This inking is then wiped clean, and is followed by "the rubs" , often primary colours, which are applied in such a way to pick up at different levels of the specially-designed, deeply embossed plates. The sculptural quality of these plates allow the ink to "light" the surface rather like one would light a sculpture or a stage set with coloured light, thus the colour follows the form in a very true way, and creates a "buzz" of colour rather like refracted light. I have developed this method myself, although William Hayter in his Atelier in Paris exploited deeply etched metal by using hard and soft rollers, along with inks of different viscosity. I prefer the softer "illuminating" results for my work.
I print onto very heavy (400gms or 600gms) handmade French De Chene printmaking paper, which holds the embossing while printing fine detail and line exquisitely, and Somerset mould-made 300gms paper. All the works are printed in my own studio and signed in strictly limited editions.
Monoprints
In 1997 Man/Woman was the theme of my series of mono-prints "Heads". This was followed in 1998 by another series of monoprints based on the buildings, doorways, churches and bull ring in the ancient Andalucian city of Ronda, near Gaucin, where I have my Spanish studio.
I have been trying to include figures back into my work for years, and the adoption of a new medium which lent itself to free drawing and strong blocks of colour allowed me to do this with my "Heads" series. With these images I am exploring the tensions, attractions, and relationships of people, and the mono-print allowed many variations on this theme. For me the great attraction of print as a medium is the capacity to produce many radically different approaches to the same image which I can enjoy as an artist when experimenting with different colour, texture, tone as well as positive and negative line.
The series are printed mostly in overlays of vibrant primary colours, and are all unique. To produce the monoprints, I develop a series of simple bold drawings on lightweight paper. The drawing is taped along one edge to my drawing board, registered to the size of the perspex plates I am using, and folded back. I roll a thin layer of printing ink onto three sheets of perspex using the three primary colours, then place the first plate directly onto the drawing board , fixing a piece of super smooth, acid free, hot press, Arch 88 rag printing paper on top, and lowering the drawing down on top. I then draw very freely on top of the drawing keeping the weight of my hand off the paper, using a pencil the colour of the ink on the plate, or ball point pen, etching needle or paint brush, finger or flat of the hand depending on the quality of line or tone I wish to create. The paper is lifted from time to time to inspect the image underneath. This creates an exciting "delayed reaction", as with the composing of a piece of music, one must imagine what the final piece is like before hearing / seeing it. The quality of line, texture and tone is breathtaking, and once I feel there is enough of one colour, I remove the plate, putting it carefully to one side, and place the second plate under the pile, in exactly the same position as the first. This is when the fun really starts as one begins to see the overlays of colour develop. The third colour, usually the blue, tends to bring the image together, and if happy with the result, I leave it at that.
The print has been nowhere near a press, is an original, coloured drawing/painting but has a vibrancy which can only be produced with layers of printing ink. Often, however, one needs to go back to previous colours, and build up many successive layers, until the full depth and richness of texture and tone is realized. I then turn to the "negative" plates which have had the ink removed , and this is where my etching press takes over. These drawn-on plates often need more ink removed to clear or thin areas in one colour to allow the successive colours to shine through, and this can be done in various ways, by wiping, painting on solvents, splattering, pressing fabric, papers etc. onto the surface, or simply redrawing directly onto the plate. The combinations are endless, and the results as different as can be, while the basic image is still recognisable.
As the plates are perspex, one can hold them up to the light to give an idea of the finished result before printing, or place subsequent plates over a print to check progress. The press will remove nearly all the ink, although occasionally I put these pale plates through the press again as the basis of another much softer variation. The main criteria is to be brave and bold, and not to mind making mistakes, as in my opinion this is where the innovative processes develop. Working in this way is like a voyage of discovery, and if I reach the stage where I feel I can achieve a better result by working directly on the piece , I will then use paint or oil pastel to complete the image, often just using the mono as a starting point and changing it radically. Thus most of the images produced can be made to work in many different ways, and the possibilities are endless.
