Circus Accomodations at Town's End (I)

Kevin Fletcher

When asked to explain his technqiues in monotype, Fletcher wrote:

“Making monotypes allows for a fairly rapid turnover of ideas since the ink is applied to the matrix directly as in painting, but more diluted down. So, it’s somewhere in consistency of pigment between oil paint and watercolor paint, but is also oil based, so it doesn’t set-up, can be worked with rags, rollers, chips or spatulas. When I work with the ink, I may have some kind of contextual intention, but it is not typically specific. I often have less grasp of particulars and just carry an emotive condition, often driven by some news items or social observation.

My training in drawing and painting has always encouraged an indulgence of Abstract Expressionism principles of “automatic writing” and imagery that arises from the subconscious. Monotype and mark making can be liberating that way so I dig about and layer up treatments with an open vision, hoping the field, the picture plane itself, yields an opportunity, a foothold.

The color prints I’ve been doing have called on different pacing to some degree, as they are tight in registration and the marks repeated, but they have aimed at a mostly hushed interiority—are approximations of my concern over events around us. I will only say that these prints are a way of my sending out some kind of well-wishing, quiet and modest thought, support for possible good. It sounds a bit naïve and soft boiled, but that’s how it is.”