Fiona Armer, Yorkshire Artist has shared her story:

My Father is 86 years old and has vascular dementia. He’s also a retired biochemist and still a practicing artist. This is to tell the story of how I shared a new artistic technique with Dad, and how we developed a collaborative process that enabled him to learn something new and both of us to share the creation of new art.

A few years ago, I moved to the Yorkshire Dales from the South Pennines and the lighter, more open landscape inspired me to try etching. This is an intaglio technique, using chemicals to bite marks into a metal plate. Plates are inked up and wiped off by hand. The marks in the plate hold ink that transfers to soaked paper when run through an etching press. I really enjoy the meticulous process of creating a new etching plate and the somewhat zen act of producing handmade prints from my original plates. It’s very different from my intuitive, impressionist oil painting practice!

I wanted to share my new love of printmaking with Dad. He can’t get to the etching studio I use in Mirfield, but he can still draw and he loves experimenting and trying new artistic techniques. So I prepare plates at the studio with a hard ground coating and take them to Dad at home. We sit at his dining table with a reversed photo or sketch for inspiration, and each draw gently with a stylus (nail) into the ground on our respective plate to remove the varnish but not scratch the zinc plate.

I take the plates away to do the line etching. Bathing the zinc plates in copper sulphate solution converts our line drawings into little grooves on the zinc plate, just where we removed the hard ground. I clean off the ground, polish up the plate and do the first proof prints, usually in black. I dry the prints and take them to Dad to discuss. He likes to see the plate as well. We talk about whether he’s happy with the drawing (he usually is) if he wants me to add tone (he usually does) and where he’d like the tones. He marks in pencil on a proof what level of tone he wants and where.

I take away Dad’s tonal sketch and work from that for the aquatinting. That’s another misleading word! In etching, aquatinting is where you fuse a layer of rosin to an etching plate and then use successive levels of stop out varnish and increasingly long etching times to add different tones to an image. It gives depth and atmosphere to the initial line drawing. When I’ve got the very darkest tones, I clean off all the stop out varnish and rosin and we’re left with an etching plate that has a more complex image bitten into it. Again, I do black proofs to share with Dad and also take the plate to show him.

Sometimes, I’ve overdone it a bit and Dad will ask me to burnish off some of the tone from the plate. Other times he’s happy with the result and will tell me what colour/s he’d like the prints in.

Alongside the collaborative etchings with Dad, I continue to create my own new images and we now have a range of artistic prints inspired by places we’ve visited together. It’s interesting seeing the difference in our studies of the same place. It also surprises me sometimes what Dad chooses to be inspired by. I used our collaborative etching of the river in Glen Feshie for my 20:20 Print Exchange contribution this year, so our etching is now being exhibited around the UK and abroad.

This started as a way of me sharing something I’d discovered with my Dad. It has evolved into a collaborative art practice that inspires many and reminds us all that it’s never too late to learn something new.

Fiona Armer