Ross and Cruise in the Big Apple
by Lucy Rayner
David Krut Workshop printmaker Jillian Ross and artist Wilma Cruise are currently in New York drawing inspiration from the cityscape and learning a great deal from the printers at the Lower East Side Printshop. They have gained insight into a number of new techniques and are currently working on three new plates with Doug Bennett who is the intaglio printer at the Printshop. They have experimented with soft-ground and spit-bite for a figurative representation in one of Cruise's plates. The second photographic plate was created by silk-screening sugar-lift, and the third was created using acid resistant markers and transferring text. Although it has been a long and complicated process, Cruise has already completed 22 new powerful and distinctive prints.
Thematically, the work Cruise has produced is a response to the metropolis that surrounds her and compares the experiences of a high-rise city with the flatness and light of the highveld. Cruise has been taken out of her comfort zone through her use of a multiple-plate print; the result is very different from her earlier work and the new techniques have taken her works to another level. Both Cruise and Ross are interacting with new people and there is an extensive interest in them and an exchange of ideas within the workshop. Later this week Ross will be working in the studio with Sheila Pepe, and will also be experimenting with artist Michelle Oka Doner.
