Ravens in the Old Quarry

Martin Truefitt-Baker, Art
6 days ago
3 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

The idea for this reduction linocut print has been in my mind for a couple of years. There is a valley and cliff face, on the way up the mountainside, that I visit and a lot. The old limestone quarry towers over the valley. 200 years ago this was a busy industrial area. The limestone was quarried, then transported down the hillside in trucks on rails and then burned in kilns to make lime. The Monmouth to Brecon canal that runs close to my studio was built to transport the lime to the fields to be spread to improve crops. Now it is a fantastic place for wildlife, especially birds. The have been ravens nesting and flying around, noisily cronking to each other, up on the cliffs for many years. You can't easily climb up anywhere near the nest(s) and I would never disturb them. The design for the print was put together with lots of imagination and research.

I didn't want to start with a tight drawing this time. Sometimes trying to be so safe can squeeze a bit of the 'poetry' out of the process. Instead I made a few quick expressive watercolour, ink and pencil sketches of the birds. Developing the interaction between the two birds.

Of course the image I chose for my final composition was a combination of these paintings plus the nest and the quarry itself. Ironically I was away for a few days in the middle of everything in Cumbria for the 'Brilliance of birds' exhibition at Rheged, which slowed things down quite a lot but did give me time to think, take a look at my previous blog post.

A bit impatient, I went straight into transferring the image to the lino, instead of transferring one tone at a time. I've been drawing out most of the tones right at the start of the process with black and white ballpoint pens for the last few prints(look at my previous blog post about the 'Over the Bridge' print). There were lots of unresolved issues (that eye needed to be moved!) that needed to be resolved at this stage about tonal values and shapes, so it took a lot longer than I hoped, maybe a mistake to avoid in the future!

Then it was on to printing. I usually deliberately limit myself to six layer of cutting and printing on a reduction linocut, after that I find a print starts to lose that nice graphic feel. This print ended up taking seven. There are two very similar light tones and two very similar dark tones, so I needed the extra rounds of cutting and overprinting to get a full tonal range. I felt there needed to be a few feathers defined in the shadows of the wings.

Once again it has ended up as a varied edition. I've slightly changed the colour of the sky and cliffs in some of the prints, mainly by increasing or reducing the amount of ochre. a few prints are nearly all blue. There is very little variation in the colours of the ravens, except where their feathers would be reflecting the background.

Can you see the two sheep?