Artist:
Gill Tyson
Title:Windmills In The Sky
Medium:Lithograph
Image size (cm) h x w: 38 x 54cm
Edition size: 20
The work that I developed around the far away landscape of Namibia reminded me of the elemental shapes and striations of my early prints of Orkney – so I decided to go back to see what I would make of the Orcadian landscape now. Perhaps it is not a surprise that these widely disparate environments - the bare hot desert of the Namib, and the windblown landscape of Orkney - have in so much in common. The arctic alpine flowers of Orkney and the tiny desert plants of the Namib reveal the inhospitableness and breathtaking optimism of these sublimely beautiful lands.
Do you remember magic painting books? You brushed the page with water and an image appeared. There ‘s something about lithography that has that same magic. There’s still the thrill of seeing the image you’ve made appear on paper. Part of being a lithographer is then being able to let the print tell you what to do next .
This project was a great opportunity for me to extend my lithography skills. With Alastair I explored the technique of ‘soap washes’. This is even more like magic painting as there’s no pigment in the wash, and you are painting the image almost blind. Not until you roll up in ink do you really see what you have. We worked on ways of adding to and subtracting from the image until I was happy with the final result. As you can go straight into printing without any further processing, it’s a very spontaneous way to make an image.
Gill Tyson was born in Heysham, Lancashire and moved to Fife as a child.
She graduated from Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University with an MA(hons) Fine Art in 1979. She has exhibited extensively since then, most recently in group shows in Vancouver and Turin. She has had solo exhibitions at Edinburgh Printmakers, The Open Eye Gallery, The Rozelle Gallery, Ayr, and in Belgium. Her work is in many collections including the Smithsonian Institution and Aberdeen Art Gallery.
Commissions
have included work for Paintings in Hospitals and The University of
Edinburgh