As I mentioned in a previous post (Combining Digital Layers), my current train of thought is circling around rocks. Boulders, pebbles, rock cuts in the highway — all of it. My rockhounding parents dragged us along on trips to find new specimens, and we did our best to amuse ourselves, but the bug never caught me. Until… now?

Now, with my parents both gone, and my ties to Ontario falling away, exploring geology feels like a way to reconcile their enthusiasm, and my upbringing in that rocky landscape, through some visual processing.

So: what do those forms look like, and how can I use them as starting points for composition, sketches, prints, or collages? I’m thinking about roughly circular shapes, like this one below, where I’ve cut out some shapes, drawn others, and left impressions behind.

I took old watercolour paper and collages and cut out roundish shapes. Sometimes, the collage remnants were enought, but, following a tip from Mark Yeates on his YouTube channel, I covered some up a bit with wrinkled tissue paper, and used them to leave impressions in an inked gel plate.

Now we’re talking! The impressions are effective, and so is flipping the piece to get the ink off the other side. And of course, there’s always the last, faint print of what’s left from THAT — the ghost print that often delights me the most. Here’s a sampling, with stripes as the form:

Now, I’ve got circles, and stripes, as prints and collage elements, scanned and ready to combine. Here are some works in progress.

Each of these iterations, new & different, references a landscape that doesn’t change — in my head, or even, in time. As Trevor Brady noted for his recent series, Moving Mountains, the place you’re from has the effect of “anchoring me to a geography that shaped my earliest self”. And so it is, for me: drawn West to mountains and sea, I remain part of the Canadian Shield. Let’s see where this work takes me.