Contemporary Etchings
Latest etchings are the PROVENCAL ones for which the last two are completed (2018 March) - see "Violet picker and mule fighting a Blizzard' and "Nightfall: resting on the road to Tourrettes-sur-loup".
But as ever there will be this 2018 a few new Wensleydale etchings - first out for My or a bit before will be a multi-plate colour etchings from high above Askrigg & Bainbridge on 'Whitfield Crag' looking south-east toward Penhill over the River Ure and showing Askrigg in the near distance with the winter orange hues of larch dramatically lit by a sunset.
2020 saw the culmination of 3 years re-working (expanding) both the text and adding a dozen or so more colour etchings to the original 29 mainly colour etchings seeping with soft Provencal summer hues. So from being a short novel of around 35,000 or so words, LA ROUTE DES VIOLETTES' WILL HOPEFULLY be published by 2022. It is centred around around Tourrettes-sur-Loup above Vence, not too far north-west of Nice.
It is a 'HUGE' love story of hope and hopes nearly dashed - so a few twists and turns, with the denoument, the climax being an extr etxraprdinary occurence which happened to the artist-author!
The first, luckily tiny edition, had myriad ERRATAS and THE ETCHINGS did NOT COME OUT AT ALL BRIGHT ON THE PAPER THEY WERE PRINTED ON.
Now PB awaits an agent and then publisher to do a proper job. The book of etchings and probably story after that (if at all) is 'FREYA' and is started, all made in the same vein of short chapters and illustrations, for any aged persons.
A collector's item of all 29 etchings in a wonderful SmithSettle (Yeadon) handmade large 'box', with the original book in an edition of just FOUR was made of which (PB had one box for himself) all 3 sold quickly to two great PB patrons and Oxford University's amazing quite new WESTON LIBRARY.
The edition of the etchings is never more than 35 as PB does all his own printing and is meticulous to get colours right and ink left on or wipe clean off plates where necessary to enhance 'atmosphere' - the realism he saw when he made small oils of the scenes (and large) - as basis for the etchings.
PIERS CAN SEND YOU A CATALOGUE DIGITALLY, A PDF, or POST a hard copy, the latter for £3.50 , but as over well half of the 500 original edition novella themselves have been by order of the artist 'pulped'/destroyed, tyou will have to wait for `the new edition with larger pages on whiter paper and 5 more etchings therein (all colour) and MUCH IMPROVED WRITING.
PLEASE READ THIS WARNING re the Giclee print
Don't buy giclees thinking they are not photographs! - even if sold for the same price as an original = handmade etched or lithoed or lithographed or linocut etc print.
All GICLEE prints are photographs - photographed artworks on handmade paper and signed to look like they are 'originals'! - and selling often at the same price as an 'original'. True 'original prints', like a handmade lithograph, linocut, woodcut or wood-engraving etc can only GROW in value.
Can you imagine spending a fortune on a Picasso photoed picture - okay signed by him? (He would never sign photos by the way) MADNESS HAS COME INTO THE ART WORLD and the public are being 'had'!
A Giclee print is a fancy french'ified word for a Reproduction!
Us etchers and all printmakers are amazed at how galleries tell the public, nay CONVINCE sometimes the public that the 'Giclee' print is ‘original when only the signature is! I and many other artists point this out and are thus vilified by the gallery staff if saying this to a client in the gallery who are buying a reproduction worth the value of the signature alone: photos can fade. It is fine to buy reproductions if they could be cheap, but to number and sign them so they look original and with a glamorous frame around them and a high price such as 'original' prints have, is not on and almost a 'con'.
A welsh gallery owner, when this was pointed to him, told Piers: “We didn’t know it wasn’t an ‘original’!!
"Piers has some of the best etchings I have ever seen. Original and creative." (Max Butterworth)
Piers Browne received this by e-mail, from someone he vaguely knows, to add fuel to his fire as an ORIGINAL printmaker whom loathes the confusion over ‘giglees’:
"My brother in law brought a giclee print for my sister for £600, and I asked her why she'd paid that much for something mass produced off a commercial run-of-the-mill commercial colour printer!" And I added... "That when you can have something completely 'ORIGINAL' being handmade which an artist has given their time and heart to produce. But she couldn't see what I meant so she is happy with her probably £10 or £20 worth of a signed photocopy on canvas (or was it paper I must check) bought for around £500, if framed!" (Mark Jakes)
Piers' father loved art, and hung in his rooms in Magdalene College, Cambridge in the 1930's, a Cezanne reproduction: but he knew it was a photographic reproduction, beautifully framed, but at low, truly an affordable price for an undergraduate. If it had been confusingly (as makes the pic look 'original') signed by Cezanne - tho' that WOULD BE VALUABLE FOR THE SIGNATURE! But no way would Cezanne or say Picasso have agreed to sign that.
Giclees are thus a way of starting to appreciate and then collect Fine Art, but best save up for the real thing.
Never ever has there been a better case of CAVEAT EMPTOR
Never has there been a better case for the word REPRODUCTION to be by law added to labels of ‘Giclees’ so the public are not, in effect, confused and paying far far more than the giclee is worth!