Ardyn Halter | In the Course of a Day

'The colour of aubergines takes me back to a wonderful moment in my childhood, the first time that I set eyes on the glorious taut black of aubergines in the market of Palafruguell in Catalonia. That must have been back in 1962, or thereabouts. It was a street market in the literal sense. Ancient black robed old women –  so they appeared to me, I was just six years old at the time – spread their produce on rectangular cloths laid out on the pavement. Some had small piles of vegetables, others just a dozen tomatoes. Not all of the women possessed simple hand-held scales and shared them with their neighbours. Then I saw the aubergines. Amazing. The black of the aubergine skins resembled the patent black of hats worn by Generalissimo Franco's police at that time. The swollen, sheeny black contrasted with the dull matt black of the civil war widows’ garb. The colour mesmerised my eyes. I could not imagine what the vegetables tasted like, what correlation their flavour might have to their colour. On several of the pavement pitches they were laid side by side with the giant, cracked beef tomatoes, the reds accentuating the blacks and the blacks the reds. 

'After a hiatus from printmaking of more than a decade, encouraged by Rebecca and Vincent Eames, I returned this year to make six new prints. They suggested a number of printmakers with whom I might like to work. Fortunately I chose Kip Gresham at The Print Studio Cambridge, and he agreed to work with me. We struck up an immediate rapport and the six new prints, exhibited now for the first time at Eames Fine Art are the result of our collaboration.

Collaboration is the right word. Working together. Each giving space to the other. The master printer facilitating the process and, with his team, enabling the artist to drive the work forwards practically, stage by stage, creatively, through proofing, and on towards new discoveries. Working with a master printer, the artist would do well to tap, to mine, his immense knowledge and experience, conscious that there is much to heed, enriching the creative process. To heed, but not to accept and try everything, to hold to an intuitive line.  And a great master printer has the experience to know when an artist can be trusted to know what he wants and to give space to let him navigate the route of his work. You really only know when the working relationship between printmaker and artist works when it works, when out of the collaboration things start to happen, to spark, to flash, to surprise.