E.134 Street at night 2006

• I. 1st state of 5

  

  Etching. An inner-suburban street scene at night, with nineteenth-century terrace houses surrounded by shrubbery on the left and bare trees in the right foreground. At the lower left is a walking figure. There is a crescent moon in the sky and, to its right, street lamps that cast a pool of light onto the road. The scene is etched with loose cross-hatching and is comparatively light in appearance.

  Impression on wove paper, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1-1’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’.

• II. 2nd state of 5

  A mesh of cross-hatching has been applied across the plate, creating a dark night-time effect. The moon has been given an interrupted contour.

  Impression on wove Magnani paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1-2’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’.

• III. 3rd state of 5

  

  Several light areas along the fences at left have been darkened with etching, as has a light patch directly in front of the figure. The aureoles of light emanating from the street lamps have been burnished, as has the area directly beneath the moon.

  Impression on wove Magnani paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1-3’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’.

• IV. 4th state of 5

  The plate has been burnished in several places at the left: on the pillar and immediately to its left in the lower left corner, on the light areas of the shrubs, and at the top of the side wall of the terraces.

  Impression on wove Magnani paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘1-4’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’.

• V. 5th and final state

  Horizontal hatching has been added to the fence pillar at the lower left. There are four variant impressions of this state.

  1. Selectively wiped impression with plate tone, on BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP I’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor ’06’.
  2. Selectively wiped impression with plate tone, on BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP II’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor ’06’.
  3. Selectively wiped impression with plate tone, on BFK Rives paper with watermark, printed by Rick Amor in his Alphington studio. Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘AP III’; lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor ’06’.
  4. Undesignated impression, hand-coloured by the artist with grey watercolour wash, on wove paper, printed by Rosalind Atkins at the Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy (Melbourne). Inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower centre: ‘Street at Night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’; secondary inscription by Rosalind Atkins in lower right corner: ‘3 HW’.

• Edition, 2006

  Edition of ten numbered impressions, on wove Velin Arches paper, printed by Rosalind Atkins at the Australian Print Workshop, Fitzroy (Melbourne), May 2016. The edition included a bon à tirer impression, an artist’s proof, two APW workshop proofs and an hors commerce impression (subsequently hand-coloured in watercolour by the artist). Each impression is inscribed in pencil, below the plate mark: lower left: ‘[status of impression]’ [or] ‘[1 through 10]/10’; lower centre: ‘Street at night’; lower right: signed and dated ‘R Amor 06’. APW chop mark in lower right corner: ‘APW [within a rectangle]’.

  Edition sheet size: 290 x 380 mm

• Edition impression, 2006 (Featured Image)

  

  Horizontal hatching has been added to the fence pillar at the lower left.

• Comment

  This etching is based closely on a charcoal drawing from 2004 (Fry 2008), which, in turn, was based on a freely painted oil, The street at night, 2001 (Fry 2008). The view depicted in E.134 is typical of parts of inner-suburban Melbourne, with its streets of intact nineteenth-century terrace houses, but it is a view that does not exist precisely like this in reality. Combined in Amor’s image are details from his photographs of such terrace houses in the suburb of Carlton, while the trees are based on those found in one of Carlton’s many late nineteenth-century garden squares.

  The densely worked hatching of the print reflects the technique used by Amor in his charcoal drawing of 2004, which he executed in the manner of Seurat’s tonal drawings, a graphic style that had been adapted by one of Amor’s teachers at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, John Brack (1920–1999), in some of his early works. Amor acknowledges that he was probably also influenced, subconsciously, by the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893), an English painter who specialized in moonlit townscapes; this connection is most apparent in the hand-coloured version of E.134 (V.d).

  The subject of the etching was, from the beginning, a nocturnal one, but Amor built up the image from a comparatively light first state. Working in this way enabled him to carefully calibrate the dark tones through the next four states, while in the fifth and final state he also used plate tone when printing.