Elke’s paintings and prints are technically diverse and very accomplished. Here is an artist who steeps herself in her materials and in her subject matter and tries to intuit an expression of feeling, landscape and nature into one. Many of these images are carborundum prints. This is a surface printmaking technique. Layers of textured carborundum powder – a kind of synthetic metal – are glued onto the plate. It is this textured surface that holds the rolled-on ink, and which then makes the textured coloured impression on the damp paper when they are rolled together through the printer’s press. Each printed image – although in numbered runs – is more or less unique. This is because the prints are manufactured by repeated inkings – in different shades and patterns – of the same plate pressed over and over onto the one sheet of paper, or in some cases different plates on the same sheet. While Elke will faithfully repeat the same routine on each sheet, invariably, there will be differences, and this is what makes printmaking so exciting: a process of happy, and no doubt sometimes unhappy, accident mixed with artist’s design. The resulting images comes about as a combination of the subject matter, the materials, the technique and the artist’s intention.

Elke also uses the more traditional intaglio technique of copper etchings. Here a copper plate is covered by wax, and the artist uses a tool to scrape away an image from the wax. The plate is dipped in acid, and where the printmaker has scratched away the wax, a groove is etched into the metal plate. The plates are rolled with ink, and then wiped clean, except that a portion of ink will remain within the furrow of the etched groove. When this copper plate, and the damp paper, are rolled through the printer’s press under immense pressure, this negative image will appear positive on paper. Sometimes an artist might press a natural object into the wax and in this way leave behind a perfect impression, which in turn will take the acid which will cut this impression into the copper plate. This we see on one side at least of Elke’s two-feather print. These are sensuous works, but also have meaning. Here Elke was thinking of a lost child, and the delicate feathers evoke the paired wings of an angel. Pairing and balancing is a recurrent theme in these works.

Finally Elke has also created a series of landscape paintings, that come from drawings and photographs she made in her time walking and exploring the hills of Wicklow. The burnt umbers, dark greens and steely greys, are evocative of an autumnal landscape, and no doubt bring up autumnal feelings for us all as we anticipate the season to come. Like Hughie O’Donoghue, or Mark Rothko, Elke uses colour and texture in an abstract manner, to conjure up and nurture feeling, as much as to recreate a particular place. Like the weather, or fleeting clouds, the changing shades and tones, provoke in us a varying palette of changing moods and feelings. This is mood music and visual nourishment for the heart and soul.

John Montague

09.09. 2009

Elke Thönnes