Etching. A giant mining scoop whose precise nature is difficult to determine, commands the space, blocking the view beyond. Below the scoop is stony rubble and in the right distance is a sliver of flat landscape. The subject is rendered with close cross-hatching, which has not printed clearly at the upper right and lower left, probably because the paper was too dry.
Much new etching has been added throughout so as to clarify the definition of the scoop and its details, and to model it spatially. To this end, the areas just below and just above the curved arm of the scoop at the lower left have been burnished.
More fine burnishing has been applied to the highlighted curve of the scoop at the lower left, and to the rocks at the lower centre.
- Catalogue Number
- E.151
- Title and Date
- Eroded landscape 2008
- Description of Featured Image
- A giant mining scoop, whose precise nature is difficult to determine, commands the space, blocking the view beyond. Below the scoop is stony rubble and in the right distance is a sliver of flat landscape.
- Where Made
- Alphington, Melbourne
- Medium Category and Technique
- Intaglio Print: Etching and burnishing on copper
- Support
- Wove paper. Identified papers: Fabriano paper with watermark: Romanesque ‘M’ with cross above; BFK Rives paper with watermark: ‘BFK RIVES / FRANCE’ with infinity symbol; Velin Arches paper.
- Dimensions
-
Image size: 218 x 324 mm
Matrix size: 220 x 330 mm - Artist’s Record Number
- RAE.178
- Printer(s) and Workshop(s)
- All state impressions printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Edition printed by Rosalind Atkins at the Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy (Melbourne).
- Summary Edition Information
- Four states. Edition of ten numbered impressions, 2008.
- Literature
- For an illustration of the painting Eroded landscape, 2008, see Niagara Galleries, Rick Amor 2008 (exh. cat.), Niagara Galleries, Richmond, Victoria, 2008, cat. no. 7.
- Collections
- State Library of Victoria, Melbourne: five state impressions, numbered 1-1 through 1-5; bon à tirer impression, ed. 2/10.
- Comment
This etching is based on an oil of the same title, painted in 2008 and exhibited in the same year at Niagara Galleries (Niagara Galleries 2008), but subsequently painted over.
The dominant motif in E.151 has its source in a newspaper photograph of a mining scoop, but the scoop is depicted here in a way that makes it unrecognizable. It looms like a giant ruin, or a surreal monument from a science fiction movie. According to Amor, in the original photograph there was a man standing in the scoop, but in the print there is no human presence, just a weird sense of vast scale, and of something perversely blocking the view beyond.
From its first state, the etching was closely hatched, and Amor had some difficulty in calibrating its tones with a burnisher, so as to imbue the object with the required spatial modelling. Nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – the work retains a disconcerting appearance that is in keeping with the artist’s love of creating strange things out of ordinary ones. The mining scoop, which causes erosion, has, in Amor’s depiction, been transformed into the eroded landscape itself.
- Keywords
- Landscape
- URL
- https://catalogue.rickamor.com.au/works/intaglio/eroded-landscape/
Record last updated 17/02/2021