These images are of prints that illustrate my responses to the poetry of Michelangel. To create them I have gone back to a 19th century method of transforming plate lithographs into surfaces (matrices) that can be printed in relief. The process of transformation from planographic to relief surface is called gillotage after the name of its inventor, Fermin Gillot. The original method used zinc plates with nitric acid as a mordant. My 'new' process uses aluminium plates with ferric chloride as a mordant.
The use of aluminium and ferric has the effect of creating a sense of disintegration and age while at the same time preserving the character, tonality, and graphic precision of the original plate.
There will be a suite of seven prints in this series. I've illustrated five of them here, along with one print taken from an unetched (in relief) plate that is an example of a first state matrix printed as a standard lithograph (the image of the hand).
