Night and Day (Over the Wine Dark Sea)

Night and Day started off as a drawing while on holiday in Greece when a friend sailed past in his spaceship-like sailing boat, which, when it came into the bay completely changed the scale of the surroundings. I wanted to make the figure very small in this vast triptych to emphasize his loneliness and to push and pull the space.

The colours in the first layer of the wood-cut were arranged according to temperature without much thought. I wanted the subsequent carving to reveal nicks of colour to help delineate the simplistic forms of trees, rocks, horizon and shore-line. We used colours for the sea, sky and shore mixed with a lot of silver pigment, this created rather a heavy, flat and saturated hue-like a carpet which was incredibly difficult to print! The whole composition has been influenced by looking at Japanese screens and after making this triptych I have decided to use one of these prints as a reverse night scene on a piece made by Wardour workshop.