Welcome to Southern Shades Gallery

Intaglio etchings and watercolors by L. P. Thomas

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GIRL IN A HAT
5” X 7”
$50

Artist's Statement

My work is influenced by the South and the Southerner’s independent spirit which is deeply rooted in their heritage and beliefs, and their passion for family and land. Much of my work reflects my appreciation for the hauntingly-peaceful places in the rural areas of the South. In the hills and hollows and back roads, peeking through encroaching kudzu, lay the remains of decaying houses, barns and churches that once held the passionate lives of a struggling people, and I wonder if these long-ago people feared the changes creeping across their land.

Exploring off the beaten path, I pass a squat wooden house anchored in the pines, its front porch lined with lard buckets, coffee cans and old plastic milk jugs filled with showy flowers enriched with chicken manure. And there’s usually an old dog or two lounging on the porch. Southerners do love their dogs and cats whether it’s the hunting dog, the neighborhood cat that shows up just to inspect the garden, or the pampered condo pet sleeping in the window. After all, we see the best of us in them: trust, love, loyalty and friendship.

Under a crepe myrtle or ageing tree, there are usually a couple of chairs, a favorite place to break beans or peel apples while a line of wash flaps in the breeze. The air is rich with the lusty smells of peach and apple orchards, heavy with old fashioned fruit, knotty, green and tart; honeysuckle and black berries twisted on barbed wire fences; and cherry trees black with crows come to feast.

A true Southerner has a quirky sense of humor, “The South shall rise again’, and ‘Take my wife, but don’t touch my gun ’, ‘if your heart aint in Dixie then get your "ass out" are all voiced with tongue in cheek. Southerner’s don’t believe these for a minute. They just like to piss-off Yankees. And so, naturally some parts of my art reflect the absurdity of life.

Intaglio Printmaking

Intaglio printmaking has a long and honored history as far back as Rembrandt and followed by the likes of Winslow Homer, Picasso, Penell, Thomas and Mary Moran, and members of the New York Etchers Society. It’s disturbing to printmakers when galleries sell ‘prints’ to unsuspecting clients who think they are getting an actual print, when in fact, they are purchasing a mechanical copy of an original work. This is usually a photograph of an oil or watercolor painting. As an investment, these ‘prints’ are worth the paper they are printed on. Another practice of some unscrupulous galleries is to sell gilclee prints. Giclee is a French word for spurt or ejaculate and refers to the spurt of the ink from a copy machine. Yes, a copy machine.
A person with little or no talent, will take a digital photograph, put it on a digital computer program, click the mouse to give it the appearance of an oil painting and then click the mouse again to create a giclee print which is a color photo copy or ink jet copy. An authentic print is made from a plate of wood, stone, Plexiglass, plastic, linoleum, zinc, and not a computer. These unscrupulous artists are an insult to centuries of printmakers who have inhaled nitric acid and chemical fumes, worked and reworked metal plates and inked them by hand to pull each print one at a time. It’s a long, expensive, time-consuming process. But it’s also an exciting and joyful process and it lends itself to the subjects I choose. I experiment with all kinds of plates and etching solutions: copper, zinc, aluminum, Plexiglas, solar plates and tin worked with nitric acid, copper sulphate and ferric oxide

imited Editions

Before an artist begins the printing process, the size of the edition must first be determined. An edition is a set number of prints that will be pulled. There is no such thing as an ‘open edition’. This phrase should let the buyer know immediately that the artist intends to keep making prints until they can’t sell any more.

If you buy a ‘print’ that has an edition of over 150, be cautious. If the edition is over 500, run the other way. An artist usually wants to move on to the next creation rather than printing the same print over and over again.

Also, never purchase prints that are labeled a second edition. When an artist decides the size of the edition and the full edition is printed, the plate is supposed to be destroyed. That’s how a limited edition ecomes limited! Greedy artists will make and number an edition then discover they could have sold more. So they make a second or third edition. In doing this, they have drastically reduced the value of any of their prints and their reputation as an artist.

 

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