Cry for the WildernessFine-Art Prints On PaperMarie-Therese Wisniowski

Preamble
For your convenience I have listed below other posts featuring my prints on paper that has featured on this blogspot:
Made to Order
Unique State (Partners in Print)
Veiled Curtains
A Letter to a Friend
Beyond the Fear of Freedom
Travelling Solander Project
Star Series
Imprint
Cry for the Wilderness
Federation on Hold – Call Waiting
Wish You Were Where?
The Four Seasons
The Creation of Hurricane Katrina – The Disruptor
The Creation of ‘Whose Place? My Place, Your Space’
The ‘Vine Glow’ Series
Vine Glow - Series 2
Vine Glow - Series 3
‘Whose Church?’
‘A Journey Ends . . . Another Nightmare Begins’

Introduction
Collagraphs are intaglio prints taken from specially designed collages. Intaglio is a family of printmaking techniques in which the image is cut or incised into a surface, known as the matrix or plate. To print an intaglio plate, ink is applied to the surface and then rubbed with a tarlatan cloth to remove most of the excess. Note: tarlatan is a starch or open-weave fabric not unlike cheese-cloth.

The marks and textures on a collagraph plate must have a low profile in order to pass through the etching press. The textured or incised areas hold the ink and so create tone. The plate can be inked with a roller and/or paintbrush etc. Substances such as carborundum powder, acrylic textured mediums, sandpapers, string, leaves and grasses can all be used in creating the collagraph plate. In some instances, leaves can be used as a source of pigment by rubbing them onto the surface of the plate.

Artists can incorporate screen-printed marks, including photographic imagery, on collagraph plates by dusting the wet printed image on the plate with carborundum powder immediately after printing. Once this is dry, the excess carborundum powder is shaken from the plate, and then the plate is inked up in intaglio, wiped and printed using the normal process. The carborundum-coated areas print with a dense, velvety appearance.

Using the same plate, each collagraph print is nevertheless unique since the amount of ink in the incisions can never be exactly reproduced and so the tonality alters from print to print.

Synopsis of Artwork: Cry For the Wilderness
Bare, barren, boulders without soil and soil without life. Where has the Flora and Fauna gone? Gone are the corridors that ushered life from one region to another. Gone is the wilderness, which witnessed survival, which witnessed diversity of life in an on-going creation.

“This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.”

Thomas Sterns Eliot - The Hollow Men

This collagraph represents the hand of a new creator. This creator controls the flora and fauna, as the top gum leaf depicts. This represents the controlled plantings. The bottom gum leaf represents plantings that were allowed to remain. In between these leaves there are no corridors that can usher life from one region to another. Isolation prevents diversity. The lack of leaves between the top and bottom leaf symbolizes the denuding of uncontrolled Flora and Fauna. The contouring of land above the bottom leaf, symbolizes the farming practice of the new creator. The presence of the new creator is witnessed by the refuse and found objects below the top leaf. There is no water here (and so blues do not work well). The cry is for the return of the wilderness.

Cry For The Wilderness I.
Size: 80 cm (length) x 60 cm (width).

Cry For The Wilderness II.
Size: 80 cm (length) x 60 cm (width).

Cry For The Wilderness III.
Size: 80 cm (length) x 60 cm (width).

Cry For The Wilderness IV.
Size: 80 cm (length) x 60 cm (width).