Page 10 - Art First: Kate McCrickard: New Romantics

CC Do you find the decisive mark-making, where no mistake can be
tolerated that print-making involves, makes for a very different pictorial
treatment from oil painting, where you can ‘cancel’ figures or sections
of the canvas by simply over-painting them to make the changes you
want.

KMcC Very much so. I’m just working on a new series of large drypoints
withthe Paris-based master printer, Michael Woolworth. You can mute
the line gouged into the copper, by flattening the barbs it throws up—
giving those rich blacks—but you can’t get rid of it without hours of
polishing and burnishing. I like the pentimenti such corrections leave
on the plate, but one has to be very careful, unlike in painting where
anything goes—my older paintings have multiple ‘ghosts’ underneath
the final image, failed images that I just painted over. You can’t do that
with copper, let alone monotype. It’s very useful to have such
restrictions and limits.

CC Your move from the small-scale work, which we exhibited in 2014
and 2016, to canvases over one and a half metres in size has intro -
duced all sorts of new developments, especially a gorgeous palette.
The chromatic scales move from subdued moods to a heightened
acidic range like that in Gluttons, Feasting, and Knight and the Devil
at the Bar. Does the subject matter ever dictate your palette?

KMcC I would say that the recent palette of brighter, more acidic, colours
was as much dictated by Pontormo’s near-fluorescent, startling, flesh
tones seen in the Deposition in the church of Santa Felicita, Florence,
that I drew in front of as a student. I wanted to key up the palette
and this did fall into place with a shift in subject matter. I was relying
too heavily on a painted black line that I would lay down to register
a compo sition and wanted to consciously get away from that. But
I also think it is linked to working from the imagination and being
less tethered to real life. Paris can look quite grey. Why can’t his arm

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