Ian Brooks: Henriksen Buttress

About the artist:

Ian Brooks works with the traditional etching techniques of sugar-lift and spit-bite aquatint, acid etching on copper plates, and hand printing in his home studio. His work draws upon close observation of the landscape and aims to evoke the sense of place unique to each location. He draws on time spent working in the polar regions, from the sub-Antarctic islands of the Southern Ocean to the central Arctic Ocean, and closer to home, walking on the Yorkshire moors near the village Haworth, where he lives.

The images are built up through many layers, with each bite of the plate adding detail or broad areas of tone. The use of spit-bite – brushing the acid over the plate with watercolour brushes – allows a control of softly graduated tones, and hazy, atmospheric effects. Throughout the development of an image, Books aims to balance closely observed detail with more abstract, loose rendering, that captures the energy of sketches made in the field. While he feels it important to give a largely accurate, clearly recognizable representation of each location, it is also necessary to work with, and surrender to, the often-unpredictable nature of etching.

Brooks has been received awards at the Flourish Award for Excellence in Printmaking, The ING Discerning Eye and New Light Art Prize.