Jon Mayers - ‘Cor Kack A Chavvy’

Jon Mayers is a 27 year old artist based in North East London. He is currently studying MA Fine Art Specialising in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art and works predominantly in etching, screenprint and digital media. He is just what we are looking for at Cristus: a devastatingly talented artist striving to fulfil his ambition, after a career in ‘psychiatric nursing and washing dishes’.

Jon was recommended to us by a mutual friend, and by one of those serendipitous events was found to be working minutes from our house with his portfolio to hand. As we looked over each carefully presented sleeve, a narrative of dark places, rabid animals and threatening people emerged, all scratched into life in a complex process of etching and aquatint. But these are just words - the images disturb. They leap from the paper and tear out your throat. Deeply human and evocative, they are not gothic fantasies from some air brush lunatic; rather, they come direct from Jon’s experience, vivid and mysterious, and they will inform his work for years to come.

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Presenting Jon’s work has been challenging. Its harsh subject matter sets the gallery apart from others, and will no doubt alienate some viewers. Other challenges, however, had to be overcome in the media room, where we had to decide if the work could be authenticially presented as fine art prints. As Jon’s originals are absolute originals, unrepeatable due to the complex processes involved and precious to the artist as the culmination of years of effort, every care had to be taken to reproduce them without compromising their impact or integrity. To achieve this, only ten sets of limited edition signed prints have been produced.

Jon has authorised the gallery to offer the originals for sale, but with a firm condition: that they must be sold as a complete collection to a single buyer. These can be viewed by arrangement with the gallery, but why not come and see the limited editions on display, or ask to see Jon’s hand-crafted book with all of the artwork and the accompanying written narrative.

For those interested in Jon’s traditional printmaking techniques, here is the explanation that he has provided for the gallery:

‘OK the process involved is a combination of etching and aquatint. I will explain it in ridiculous detail- In etching you can either use steel (which is cheapest but has a grey tone which you can polish down with a bit of practice and elbow grease) copper or zinc. I used zinc for the prints you’ve got but I’m messing about with all the others now.

So the prints you have are done by laying a ground on top of a zinc plate and scraping away the ground with a fine tool to create the drawing. When you put the plate in acid (I think it’s nitric acid) the acid eats away where you have scraped the ground off and leaves the rest alone. Then you take off the ground using white spirit. To print this you cover the whole plate in ink (which is kind of like shoe polish) and really work it into the etched lines. Then you buff off the ink using ’scrim’ which is kind of a cross between a net and a rag, and if you want to get it really clean you can use very thin bits of  paper and cotten buds to clean it up as well. The ink stays in all the bits you have eched however. Then you lay the inked up plate face up on the eching press bed (it is a huge bit of victorian machinery with tons of pressure  which is a bit like a big mangle with a bed and a roller and a wheel you have to turn) and over the top of this you lay a dampened bit of paper.

You lay blankets over the plate and paper and then squash it through the press by turning the  wheel. The damp paper is pushed up into the etched lines and pulls out the ink. When you pull the paper off the plate (it is stuck to it with the pressure) you have a relief (reverse) print of the lines you have etched on the plate.

Aquatint is a way of creating tone- shades from white to grey to black- and is done using an ‘aquatint cupboard’. This is a box with a platform inside covered in a resin in a fine powdered form. You turn a handle very fast on the (shut) box spinning the platform so the resin dust inside is blown up into a cloud. Then you open the box and lay the etching plate inside on the platform and shut it again. (You have to wear a mask to do all this because the dust is some nasty shit you don’t want in your lungs.) A fine layer of the dust will settle on the plate in a couple of minutes. Then you take out the plate and lay it on a rack and heat it from the underside using a a gas flame tool. This takes a little while but melts the resin to the plate- you can see it changing colour from a certain angle so you know it is done.

After it’s cooled down you can paint out what you want to keep white using stop out or “Rhinds” varnish. When you put the plate in the acid the varnish stops the acid ‘biting’ the plate, while the resin coating lets the acid bite the plate in very small dots, so it creates an overall grey tone rather than the black lines you get from etching. You can leave it in for a couple of seconds then take it out and wash it off, dry it and apply some more varnish. By doing this you can get a range of tones.

With regards to my prints, as I mentioned above most people once they have made the plate just ink it up, take the ink off down to the etched parts and then print it, so you can have a limited run of identical prints taken from the same plate. My prints differ from this in that I spend ages messing around leaving ink on certain parts of the plate to create shadow, movement, weather effects (such as the rain and clouds and the ripples in the water in the puddle on the ‘gate’ picture)- basically painting with the ink. So rather than each print being part of an edition, it’s kind of a one off.

This is because I wasn’t producing a run of prints, I was making illustrations for a book, so they were always destined to be scanned and digitally printed. However, digital print doesn’t sound so great and apparently ‘gilclee’ (you’ll have to check the spelling for this) is the proper posh term to use when describing the complete process.’

Many thanks to Jon Mayers, and reproduced in full from his recent email to the gallery 24/12/08.

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The Devotional Art of Julie-Ann Bowden

Julie-Ann’s work is special to us at ‘Cristus’, and has been part of our plans from the beginning. To know the artist, is to know her work. No doubt we are all shaped by our experiences, but whereas we might try to shroud ourselves in mystery, Julie-Ann proclaims her past, in her words and in her paintings. She openly tells of her difficult childhood, feeling like an outsider, being left-handed and writing backwards with her right hand. But always, she says, her artistic gifts saw her through, giving her solace and an inner confidence that there was something she could do well. In competitions at school she excelled at life drawing, then at A Level she achieved the highest grade in Graphic Design, followed by more success studying Illustration at The Northern School of Creative Art. She had overcome disadvantage and low expectations and she determined that one day she would become a full-time artist. This is the spirit that drives her art.

Cristus is not a faith-based gallery, but we admire the purity of vision that can come from absolute conviction. Something we do claim, however, is to be a contemporary gallery, which may seem at odds with Julie-Ann’s iconic angel paintings, clearly rooted in Christian imagery from medieval to pre-Raphaelite to American folk art. What’s more, in her desire to express ’pure love and beauty through art’, one may see a contradiction with a contemporary aesthetic that seeks to challenge the notion that beauty - if it can be found at all - somehow equates to quality. Certainly, it is an area to debate… and we have debated it here, long and hard. The result is that we have placed Julie-Ann in the same small space as the more-overtly challenging artworks, such as Jon Mayer’s dark and forbidding ‘Cor kack A Chavvy’ etchings. Contrast them. Both artists have something big to say, that they wish to share. See beneath the soft beeswax finish of Julie-Ann’s paintings, into the serene faces of the angels. See into their black eyes. Is this a vision of ‘pure love’?

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