Elisabeth Frink | The Canterbury Tales: Studio Promotion

Elisabeth Frink is best known as a sculptor but she was also one of the greatest printmakers of the past century. She treated printmaking in a similar way to her sculptures - the surfaces of the etching plate were cut, scored, carved and bitten by the acid in such a tactile way that Frink’s etchings are somewhere between a carved sculpture and a drawing. 

Frink’s Canterbury Tales series is a collection of interpretive rather than directly illustrative images; her simply drawn figures and animals seem monumental like her famous Goggle Head sculptures, and like Chaucer's own characters they are both satirical and sublime. Often the main characters are left as white negative spaces and the background: the sky, landscapes, sea, and drapes or interiors, are treated with a huge array of complex and experimental printmaking techniques to create fascinating textures.

Frink worked with Nigel Oxley on these etchings and together they explored a variety of different printmaking methods from aquatint, open bite, burnishing, scraping and different ways of wiping the plates.In the Wiseman catalogue raisonné of Frink's work Oxley wrote: "Lis was always prepared to accept etching as a living organic process and quickly realised its potential for exploitation, and understood the generosity of a medium allowed its freedom."