Blue River Marbled Moon Print
The Pull That Never Stops
A vein of colour running through a marbled field, the kind that gives this piece its name, is made by drawing a single tool through the bath in one continuous motion rather than combing evenly across it, letting the colour trail and thin unevenly the way a real current does around obstacles. Marbling has no way to erase or correct a stroke once it is made; the pattern exists only on the surface tension of the bath for the few seconds before the paper is lowered onto it, so a "river" of colour is quite literally a record of a single, uninterrupted gesture, not built up in layers the way a river's own bed is built up over years by moving water.
The moon's own relationship with water is more direct than a passing resemblance in a pattern. It is the moon's gravity, more than the sun's, that raises the tides in Earth's oceans, pulling a bulge of water toward it on the near side of the planet and, less intuitively, leaving a second bulge on the far side too, where the solid Earth is being pulled away from the water slightly more than the water itself is. As the Earth rotates through those two bulges roughly once a day, most coastlines experience two high tides and two low tides in every roughly twenty-four hour period. The sun adds a smaller pull of its own, reinforcing the moon's effect at full and new moon to produce the highest "spring" tides, and partly cancelling it at the moon's first and last quarter to produce smaller "neap" tides, a fortnightly rhythm that fishing and coastal communities have tracked for as long as they have depended on the sea, long before anyone understood gravity well enough to explain why it happened.
This piece is printed on 100% cotton rag paper, one of a limited edition of ten, each floated and pulled by hand so that the exact path of the vein through the pattern is unrepeatable. It is mounted on a high quality round window-cut mount board, offered with a choice of mount colours, and backed with an acid-free card board to protect the sheet over time. No frame is included, leaving the choice of frame and glazing to the buyer; UV-filtering glass or acrylic is sensible for a wall that gets any direct sun through the day.
A piece with a strong directional vein running through it benefits from being hung with that direction in mind, ideally running with rather than against the strongest horizontal or vertical line already in the room, a mantel, a door frame, a run of shelving. It suits a hallway or stairwell particularly well, spaces that are themselves about movement from one place to another, echoing the sense of flow in the print itself.
This is a limited edition of ten, made in a single size of 40cm x 40cm (400mm x 400mm), priced at £60, mounted on round window-cut board.
Blue River Marbled Moon Print — 40cm x 40cm, marbled print on cotton rag paper, mounted on round window-cut board. View the piece