Etching technique consisting of intaglio and chine -colle enabled me to express and evoke a feeling of mystery and the sense of the sublime when confronted with the age of rocks and their significance. When in Dales Gorge in Karijini National Park I felt awed by the depth of the rock-forming steep gorge. On the gorge floor strata within the rocks alternate from pink brown and red purple. This layering caused by oxidation of the iron laden ocean when oxygen produced from stromatolites photosynthesis gradually entered the Earth’s atmosphere.  The striped pattern built up from the ocean floor as early as three billion years ago. Water cut through the gorge over millions of years as  land gradually uplifted.

Several etchings are artist’s proof  and  require fine tuning before I print an edition. I print small editions because I prefer to change the plate and produce one off images because it enables me to see the subject in many different ways.

My trip to the Pilbara in April this year can be read and viewed with photographs and frottages done on sight in my first posts on this blog.

This week I tried more proofs on different textured paper – rice paper, a thickly textured but porous spongy handmade paper as well as Fabriano.

I think line crispness suffered due to too much texture and the second last one looks too scrubby.

I love the intensity of black and my idea was that it would evoke a sense of mystery regarding this 3 billion year old clue to a momentous moment in Earth’s history.

I discovered a blog titled geo-aesthetics which sounded more accurate a description to my imagery than the term contemporary landscape because the content as well as the form is central.

The address of the blog is geo-aesthetics.blogspot.com.au