00:00I'm Ken Curry and I'm a painter and printmaker.
00:03We're at Glasgow Print Studio because we're launching a new series of aquatints that I've made at the workshop called Anturas or The Crossing.
00:14We decided that we were going to print these in a kind of indigo.
00:18Normally we just print with quite rich blacks but we decided to print with indigo because it seemed to
00:25chime with the themes of the work which are very much related to the sea and the sky and the Hebrides and stuff like that.
00:32I wouldn't say that it was a departure in the sense that it's very much what I've been thinking about
00:39and these prints very much feed into the paintings I've been making.
00:45In fact, both recent paintings and these prints have been in a kind of dialogue with each other for quite a while now.
00:54A lot of painters are really great printmakers as well. A lot of printmakers are good painters as well.
01:01And sculptors, you know, it's a very fluid interaction between the different disciplines.
01:06It's almost like there's no boundaries sometimes.
01:09I certainly don't see a massive boundary between what I'm doing as a painter and what I do as a printmaker.
01:14They both have very similar qualities, particularly in aquatint which is a very, very painterly process actually.
01:21I just love the atmosphere that a print has. Sometimes I love the richness of the dark colours and dark blacks.
01:28I love that velvety quality that they can have. But also I like the really very, very incisive line that you can get with etching as well.
01:38Which you wouldn't really get in painting, but with etching you get a really incredible fine line, which I absolutely love.
01:46The overall title is The Crossing and it suggests a journey from one place to another, which can be a physical journey.
01:54You know, that someone crosses from one land to another land. But there's also the sense of an artistic journey as well.
02:00Every piece of work you make is like a journey. You go from the start to the end and you cross all the challenges that you face.
02:09But a lot of the work recently has been very much focused on my experiences in the highlands and islands.
02:16The more archipelagos up there of St Kilda and North and South East, these places have been going up there for quite a long time now.
02:26Looking into the history of the peoples there and also, in particular, some of the sort of traumas that that particular part of the world faced.
02:39You know, it's a very beautiful landscape, very haunting landscape, but there is a kind of tragic element to it, which I find I'm attracted to.
02:48The paintings have been exhibited, the paintings have been made. They were exhibited last October in London.
02:55And just recently, again, in Stornoway, in Anlantair. It was really important for me to bring that work back to that part of the world,
03:03because a lot of the ideas that I was kind of exploring were from that part of the world.
03:10But there's also other elements as well. There's a kind of Atlanticist element in the sense that it's not just about the Hebrides.
03:16There's also things in this particular body of work that touch on places like Iceland and stuff like that.
03:22You know, it's that kind of North Atlantic area that has provided me with quite a lot of imagery.
03:28We will see them coming together. We're going to exhibit them together in Inverness Museum and Art Gallery in October.
03:34We're going to show the paintings there. And as they've got a kind of little room at the side, we will show the prints as well.
03:41And people will be able to see with their eyes, as it were, the dialogue that has existed between the paintings and the prints,
03:49particularly the kind of surface textures and the surface abrasions that are in both.
03:54I always have this rule never to talk about paintings that have never been painted, you know, in case I give the game away.
04:00But definitely there's not going to be an abrupt change to what I'm doing.
04:04What I'm doing just now is very much a continuity here.
04:07But maybe just going in a slightly different direction.
04:11The exhibition is called Indigo Series and Turas The Crossing.
04:16And it's from the 5th of September to the 4th of October at Glasgow Prince Studio.
04:21Pause.
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