Fugue in C

This is the first of several 'cover versions' I've made of wood or lino cuts. The type of print that lends itself to this approach is one whose foreground is largely connected and where there is very little texture in the print. The only version I found of the - anonymous - original has just 125x178 pixels of foreground detail so there is hardly any definition and a certain amount of extrapolation was needed (necessary in any case when transposing from one medium to another).

The heavy-duty black paper is hand-cut with a scalpel and sandwiched between sheets of glass over a background of watercolour paper. I took this as a gift to my sister Jacqui, on a visit to SA. (At 200dpi, the original would be less than 2cm square - the cut-out is 11x18cm. The size difference is not easy to appreciate when images are digitally enlarged and reduced automatically on display.

While using another artist's work as the basis for one of my own makes me slightly uneasy, thinking of it as a cover version (as with a song) makes me somewhat more comfortable - the two mediums are completely different.

June 2017