Kate Boucher

The quality of light I’m hunting for is one where there is some sense of mystery, where the light is’t even. It should have deep, complex, velvety black contrast, but also some areas of subtlety, softness: over exposed and indistinct.

Perhaps it’s useful to explain that I gather ‘raw data’ for the drawings in the form of many photographs taken with my iPhone, once my interest has been piqued by something in a  landscape. I take these pictures not to create a ‘good photograph’ but to record as much as I can, so that when I return to the studio, they may cumulatively add up to or will begin to indicate whatever underlying reason there was to snag my attention in the first place. This then begins a process of mediating that landscape through my own personal experiences and remembrances, to form the drawings these source images are a catalyst for. I will often push the exposures so that I have extremes of light and dark that, when I’m composing the drawing allow for elements of an overexposure and under exposure to be combined to create the drawing - just as there is when you turn your head and the light passes across your face. The photographs act as a form of stop motion of where my eyes have landed, like recording something you catch out of the corner of your eye, so that you can look at it directly. That direct looking then becomes the drawings.

The technique I use is to lay down charcoal onto the paper surface and then remove it with erasers to reveal the white of the paper - I don’t use chalk or white pastel to render the light.  I use soft cloths of different types of fabric to apply the charcoal, hard plastic erasers to remove it, on a surface of hot press (smooth) printmaking papers. These combinations allow me to build up many layers, adding and subtracting charcoal. The printmaking paper I use is robust enough to take this intensive working of the surface. I’m chasing that shimmering, shifting quality of light that our eye captures as we move through the world.

The American painter, Andrew Wyeth’s use of light was a formative influence on both my techniques and the processes by which my work comes about. In Thomas Hoving’s wonderful, revealing book, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth, Wyeth spoke about the importance of knowing a landscape in all in moods and in all its lights, finding the bones of it and so exposing your emotions tied to it. He recounted the lengths he would go to, to find bright white papers so the light would shine from under the work. In particular I think of, Wolf Moon (1975) where a white farm house and the sparse darkened landscape in front of it, are seen from above, with patches of snow lit by moonlight. The snow is dazzlingly light, and that is the bare paper glowing in contrast to the densely woven, fine layers of the dark and complex watercolour around it. This high tonal contrast and unusual composition is unsettling and full of unspoken narratives.

I start my day very early, I walk for half-an-hour (15 minutes out, 15 back) every day, looking, noticing, photographing. That early light is beautiful, gentle, sometimes sparkling. The first half-an-hour or so in the studio is always without artificial light, the morning light and soft shadows help me ease my way into the working day. At night I work with a soft studio light, enjoying the slight fuzzy indistinct edges and the quality of marks that brings about- similar in some ways to what I see on twilight walks: chasing that indistinct seeing/not quite seeing of dusk.