Collagraph

I’d never heard the term, collagraph, until yesterday, when I came across it in the Moray Gallery. An artist called Robert West has an exhibition on at the moment, in which he uses the technique.

Seemingly, a collagraph print is a collage printmaking technique, and is a form of Intaglio printing. (That is, one of the kinds of printing where something sharp is etched into a surface.) The collagraph plate is printed in the same way as etchings, but also include the basic principle of relief printing, and can be printed either as intaglio or relief.

A collagraph is a collage board where the materials are assembled on a flat base or plate (the matrix) in order to form a relief block with different surface levels and textures.

Collagraph plates are created by sticking and gluing materials like textured paper or fabric onto the plate and then coating it with varnish or acrylic medium afterwards to protect the materials.

That’s a simple introduction to it. There’s a fairly clear explanation here.

Unfortunately, Moray Gallery (which is right next to where I work, and used to be only two doors along from me when I ran the bookshop in Princes St) doesn’t have any of West’s prints on display on the website.

I’ve included a collagraph above, which appears on the Flickr.com site. It’s by someone who calls themselves 10b travelling. But if you’d like to see more examples, just Google the word, and look at the images. There are heaps on the Net.