James Stroud - etchings

  

This print (the one on the right is a detail) is hanging in the hall outside the Harnett gallery, where the Joan Snyder retrospective is. It is part of a series (Stations II, 2005) by James Stroud (b. 1958) – nine etchings with aquatint, drypoint, beeswax and chine colle on paper. I LOVE THEM! It’s just a visceral attraction to the variety of scrapey marks and faint splashes, and the fibrous threads that you can see at the border of the black and white; and then there is the delicate sheen of the beeswax that you can pick up from some angles. It’s a pity these have to be under glass. If bees themselves could make pictures, this is what they would make!

Alice Anne Ellis