Rachel Gracey A.R.E. Â SOUTH - SOUTH WEST
Fig. 1 Rachel Gracey in her studio, with the Mann Press and prints hanging behind
ZULEIKA GALLERY Rachel Gracey: South South-West 16 - 26 May 2018 3rd Floor 6 Masons Yard St James’s London SW1Y 6BU
Cover Image: SSW9
Fig .2 &.3. Sketchbook studies for SSW
Rachel Gracey: South South-West in Perspective Ursula Weekes Rachel Gracey stands out in the current British printmaking scene for her commitment to lithography as her primary form of artistic expression. In March 2017, Gracey was elected an Associate Royal Engraver by the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers, acknowledging her skill and contribution to contemporary lithography and linocut. Her work is widely exhibited and is now in the permanent collections of the British Museum, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the Royal Collection. Rachel Gracey’s practise is part of a long tradition of British landscape artists. Her work is marked by a deep involvement in the local landscapes of her life. She works in sets, enabling her to explore the changing vistas, colours, moods and seasons of particular places. Gracey intuitively perceives the rhythm and shapes of these landscapes. She is constantly outdoors drawing and painting, and it is these experiences and memories of the landscape that she transforms into the layered shapes and colours of her lithographs (fig. 2 & 3). Gracey works on a huge Mann Direct Press in a garden studio at her home in Oxford. The press is 9 ½ x 5 ft, with a printing bed of approximately 3 ft x 4 ft (fig. 1). This means that she can work on a very large scale. Lithography is based on the idea that oil and water repel. When writing or drawing with a grease-based substance on a flat limestone (wax crayons, a greasy ink called tusche, pencils), oil-based inks can be made to adhere to this surface, while being repelled by water in non-printing areas of the stone. This occurs when the surface of the stone or plate is covered in a solution of gum arabic and nitric acid, creating grease-receptive image areas, and water-receptive non-printing areas.
The ambitious technical demands of Gracey’s lithographs, the complex layering and choices of colours, the variety of marks, and size, require a virtuoso ability to understand the precise physical demands of her medium and the press. It is a process that requires patience. Gracey prints all her own work and usually begins with pulling 12-15 impressions of the first plate to begin making an edition. Each colour in the finished work (normally she works with about 6 to 8 colours) represents an individual plate in the printing process. Each plate must be printed separately and hung for five days to dry. In her experience it is while printing the last two or three plates, that impressions have to be discarded from the edition. If, for example, she mixes a particular tone for colour seven and feels it is not right when printed, the impression has to be rejected, despite it having been patiently printed and hung for almost six weeks in her studio already. In this series of lithographs, South South-West, Gracey has moved away from places populated by trees, such as Wimbledon Common and the Parks in Oxford, to pursue the open spaces of the coast line, fields, the sea and the sky. These themes are first evident in her Suffolk Rivers, but in South South-West they are addressed more boldly in colour and mood, as well as in the range of representational and abstracted compositions. Gracey’s South South-West series was conceived over a six year period, and captures both the momentary and the timeless: she conveys the changing patterns of clouds, the vibrancy or dullness of a day, the colours of open land, the reflection of light in water. The absence of humans or signs of their presence gives the landscapes a timelessness. Rachel Gracey’s work celebrates these daily cadences of land, sky and coast with the eyes of someone who does not take these miracles for granted.
Dr Ursula Weekes is an independent Art Historian and Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specializes in the history of print and in Indian Mughal art.
SSW 1 Lithograph 24 x 25 cm Edition of 8 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 2 Lithograph 26 x 26 cm Edition of 4 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 3 Lithograph 23 x 25 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 4 Lithograph 25 x 28 cm Edition of 10 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 5 Lithograph 25 x 28 cm Edition of 7 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 6 Lithograph 29 x 32 cm Edition of 5 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 7 Lithograph 25 x 27 cm Edition of 8 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 8 Lithograph 28 x 31 cm Edition of 7 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 9 Lithograph 26 x 30 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 10 Lithograph 31 x 30 cm Edition of 7 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 11 Lithograph 26 x 30 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 12 Lithograph 27 x 29 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 13 Lithograph 28 x 30 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 14 Lithograph 30 x 28 cm Edition of 4 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 15 Lithograph 26 x 30 cm Edition of 6 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 16 Lithograph 24 x 29 cm Edition of 4 £360 unframed £430 framed
SSW 17 Lithograph 27 x 29 cm Edition of 5 £360 unframed £430 framed
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