Simultaneous Solar plate!

While engraving my violins in the evenings and printing them in the day, I have been thinking about also making a series of solar plate prints, I decided i would make two one of my violin teacher Elaine, and one of Howard who helped me in obtaining the violins, I feel these are key people within this body of work, and again to me the people are what make the experience, what make experiences valuable, through looking for the violins I met an extremely interesting person, and got to see inside a studio that struck cords with what I wanted to achieve, the visits to Howard's studio and shop inspired me and got me thinking about how I would like to exhibit the works, it became important to the work itself. Therefore I wanted to make the images very perfect, more like music. I wanted to make an edition of both and have them almost like books of music score.

These solar plates became another investigation into the solar plate process, I mixed solar plate with chine-colle, using duet music I play with my violin teacher I composed images using both strips of the music, and begun to experiment with subtle colours, adding small amounts of yellow and greys, and touches of brown, I wanted to almost create the colours reflected in the wood of the violin itself. Using a collage of images and printing them onto acetate I made the solar plate, and through printing over and over I began to get the results I wanted, and made editions of twelve of each plate. I used the image of lucky cats taken on my travels in Southeast Asia, this was a play on the fact that all of the violins I am using are all made in Asia, they are churned out in masses cheaply for schools.