An introduction

 

Text: Carl Lindh

“Monotype is a printing process where the artist doesn't have to worry about all of the "technical" 
aspects of printmaking and can instead concentrate on being creative. Energy, improvisation, gesture, 
impulse and chance are all characteristics of this printing process.”
 

History of the Monotype 
William Jung
 

Imagine you walk through a landscape as if you were taking a stroll in nature. After some time your pace seem to change. Your steps become shorter and your eyes start to wander. For the first time in a very long time your senses seem to work together. Your nose with your eyes, with your ears. Yourwhole body, everything focus on the same thing, on the landscape you are in. You  register all the details. Then you leave. You might step in to your car, on to your bike, on to the plane or on the boat which will take you back to your ordinary situation, your daily life.

What if you would try and recreate this ephemeral experience you just had of nature? Where would youbegin? For the artist Mats Lindh it begins with a slow processing of this memory. Memory does something to an experience. Some fragments disappear. Others are reinforced and exaggerated. Things shift around. After sometime, what is left might only be a smell or a sound – a sensation. Or as in case of Mats Lindh a combination of colours – a palette. The memory has been condensed into some very precise components and it is in these components where the whole experience of the landscape is hidden. 

To unravel this memory Lindh uses water colour on a specific paper with a technique called monotype. His paper is very thin, with very strong fibers, like bible paper. When the paper is folded or wrinkled the fibers break and in the folds and cracks the colour is absorb differently from the surface. This creates lines. These lines start to articulate the details in a landscape. An intuitive dialog between the paper, colours and the artist is what creates the image. It is an interplay between a memory of a landscape, a palette of colours, a specific paper and the randomness of a printing process that makes Mats Lindh's images so close to nature itself. Almost as if you could smell the smells and hear the sounds. 


Bio

Mats Lindh, born 1947 in Sågmyra, Dalarna. Sweden. He lives and works in Hässleholm, Sweden. Lindh  has studied water colour painting for amongst others professor Arne Isacsson and copper etching and printmaking at evening classes at Forum art Academy in Malmö in the 80s. His work have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions mostly around Scandinavia.