John Zurier

Summer Book, the title of John Zurier’s 2016 portfolio of eight etchings, refers to his stay in Copenhagen

‘Working on the small plates it occurred to me that they had an intimacy like looking at the pages of a book. When I wasn’t working, I would wander around the city looking at the light reflecting on the water and the buildings, and the trees against the sky, and the deepening shadows of late evening in King’s Garden. The idea of making a book of summer notes came to me. I thought of it as a book of random visual vignettes, formless with no apparent order, where the pleasure comes from finding the subtle connections and contrasts.’

Unlike the time consuming and technically complex etching process, the creation of monotypes is immediate and requires spontaneous, intuitive decisions. Zurier created his monotypes with watercolour on copper and plastic plates, and painting on the two materials gave different results once the prints were pulled: the monotypes pulled from copper plates turned out to have a greater transparency in colour, while those made from plastic were more opaque.

Monotypes are unique works, created on a featureless plate. In contrast to other printing techniques, the artist does not leave permanent marks on the plate but simply paints on its surface. The plate thus serves as a mere vehicle to transfer the artist’s painting onto paper; the resulting image cannot be printed twice. The residue ink may be used to create so-called ‘ghosts’, which give the artist the possibility of testing variations of an image.