Chris Allan graduated from Edinburgh University and College of Art in 1970. His career was spent in the museum world, at Manchester University and subsequently Glasgow University. He has made prints at Glasgow Print Studio since the 90s and is the author of Elizabeth Blackadder Prints (Lund Humphries, 2003). In 2014 he designed a reconstruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s lost decorative scheme for Glasgow Art Club.
Drypoints from Nature
These prints are based on full size studies from life. The flora are cut from the hedgerow and drawn in the studio. The fauna are variously drawn from life and from museum specimens or adapted from photographs and book illustrations. But a pile of sketches do not make art – one needs models on which to build ideas. Both the format and the content relate to the hanging scrolls developed by oriental “Bird and Flower” painters over centuries. The verisimilitude of the Dutch C.17 flower painters and the technical prowess of the best engravers of botanical flora always astonish me, while the wildlife specialists of the past two centuries set a benchmark which I struggle to emulate.
Drypoints are among the simplest of prints to make. One scratches the design into the surface of a polished copper plate with a hardened steel point. The furrows cut, and the displaced metal (called burr) thrown up by the point will both hold ink, and are printed like any engraving or etching. However, repeated inking and printing soon wear the image down, limiting the number of good impressions. When a composition is clear and firm, but not heavily worked, I take proofs for hand-colouring. The watercolour washes augment the underlying structure without looking muddy. Additional work then strengthens the design to create a second state in monochrome.
- the artist