adminStephen Garan’anga Visual Art
For four decades of its existence, Gallery Delta Foundation for Art and the Humanities, formerly Gallery Delta, has strived to promote various art forms to provide art audiences an alternative to the almighty conquering Zimbabwean stone sculpture that took everything under its wings since the 1960s right up to the late 1990s.
Graphics, including printing-making have been crucial expressional forms on their radar in which annually they would dedicate an own exhibition and would also feature more work in other various calendar year shows.
That passion has not subsided, and currently they are showing ‘‘From Line to Form’’, an exhibition of drawings, graphics and found object sculptures with a lot of lines to conceive spectacular forms. ‘‘From Line to Form’’ seeks to evaluate and encourage printmaking which is less explored by the multitude of contemporary artists of Zimbabwe.
Printmaking, which encompasses woodcuts, engraving, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, drypoint, lithography, screen-printing, digital prints and foil imaging is often a core component of fine-arts training courses, and today’s printmakers are grounded in most of these print methods.
Prints are made from a single original plate or surface, called a ‘‘matrix’’. There are several different types of matrix, including : plates of metal, typically copper or zinc which are used for engravings or etchings; stone, which is used to make lithographs, woodblocks employed for woodcuts; linoleum, used for linocuts; fabric plates used in screen-printing, and others.
Conventional fine prints are usually produced in limited editions sets, each print being numbered and signed by the artist.
There are three principal methods of printmaking, namely Relief printing, Intaglio printing and Planographic (surface printing) although there are several variations within each method. In Relief printing the background is cut down, leaving a raised image which takes the ink. Materials usually used here wood and linoleum.
To make a relief print, the raised are of the wood or lino is inked and paper is pressed onto it to receive the inked impression. Relief printing is used for woodcut, woodblock, engraving, linocut, and metal cut. In Intaglio printing, a metal is used, and the selected image is either engraved into the metal with a tool known as a ‘‘burin’’, or a plate is coated with a waxy acid-resistant substance called ‘‘ground’’ upon which the design is drawn with a metal needle.
The plate is then soaked in acid which eats the areas exposed by the drawing to produce an image. Intaglio is used for engraving, etching, mezzotint, aquatint, chine-colle and drypoint. Intaglio uses the opposite process to woodcuts, in that the raised portions remain blank while the grooves or crevices are inked.
In Planographic (surface printing), the whole matrix surface is involved, but some areas are treated to retain the ink. The best known example is Lithography, during which the design is drawn onto the matrix (stone) with a grease crayon. Ink is then applied to the whole surface, but adheres only to the grease marks of the drawing.
Other surface printing methods include stencil printmaking — where the image or design is cut out and then printed by spraying ink or paint through the stencil. The plain graphic technique is also used for monotyping, digital prints, screen-printing and pochoir. Another print method is stencil-printing from which silkscreen printing (serigraphy) is derived.
Currently in Zimbabwe the various methods of print making are either less or none explored.
It seems this is due to a combination of varying inhibiting factors which include the state of our economy which restricts affordability, lack of various tools and materials in the country, lack of knowledge on most of the established practitioners as they did not go through the formal training at tertiary colleges where a few of these techniques are taught and the bias towards such well locally established art-forms as painting and sculpture with possibilities of big bucks being fetched with minimum sales.
Unfortunately nationwide there has not been strategies to curb this scenario especially when students leave colleges where there are some facilities.
However in the show ‘‘From Line to Form’’ the widely used cardprint, serigraph and drypoint reveal how much the techniques have been mastered. Classical broad linear charcoal and ink drawings of domesticated animals by senior artist Arthur Azevedo offer fluidity in the fairly small reception office space whilst highly innovative Wallen Mapondera’s infectious string drawings too of domestic animals make an effortless flow of the tightest of spaces of the Gallery.
He has been using socio-political symbolisms of animals and their disposition, to explore human oligarchy and power structures in which power rests with a small number of people and he uses zoomorphic and anthropomorphic visual templates to present his case.
The only elegance of line and form in three dimension solely belongs to high rising wireman Johnson Zuze. His wide use of recycled wire and strips of rubber in interweaving like the cock weaverbird, encaging an array of found objects to create formidable forms mostly of animals both wild and domestic leaves one struck by the skill, the sheer labour intensity and the ability to express amongst other things.
He has ‘‘Right On’’, a sitting chameleon with its milliseconds fully extended tongue sucking up a tiny insect like a mosquito whilst exposing its colourful inner contents chiefly degenerated cheap imported electric irons encaged by interweaving and haphazardly wound wires and data cables. His other pieces include ‘‘Pinyata Bull’’, ‘‘The Dog and the Bone’’ and ‘‘Christ Fed the Multitude’’.
Other participants of the show include Misheck Masamvu, Evans Tinashe, Franklin Dzingai, Virginia Chihota, Admire Kamudzengerere, Helen Lieros, TawandaMufambi, Tendai Mupita, Gareth Nyandoro, Option Nyahunzvi and Greg Shaw. The show on 110 Livingston Avenue, Greenwood Park in Harare will come down in late September 2015.
Online Reporter