RAVEN

© The Artist

RAVEN 1986

Adrian Wiszniewski (1958 – )

Details

Dimension
56 X 75.5 CM
Media
SCREENPRINT
Accession number
P5452

Summary

Whilst in his final year at University Charles Booth-Clibborn published The Scottish Bestiaryunder his imprint The Paragon Press. Booth-Clibborn had invited the Orkney born writer George Mackay Brown to produce texts, in the form of poetry and prose, to accompany 20 prints by Scottish artists depicting 19 animals – real and mythological. Wiszniewski one of the first artists Booth-Clibborn approached; he chose to make lithographs of the Dragon, Salmon and Unicorn. In the end Wiszniewski made three prints in three different media and exchanged the Salmon for the Raven. Apart from two etchings these were the first prints the artist had made. Raven is an eight-colour screenprint. Finding the bird difficult to draw Wiszniewski borrowed a stuffed one from Liverpool University museum and produced a drawing in gouache for Peacock Printmakers in Aberdeen. This was used to generate the colour separations for the screenprint and, after it was proofed, the artist produced a black screen to pull the image together.

Further reading:
Contemporary Art in Print, Scottish National Gallery of Modern and The Paragon Press, 1995, texts by Jeremy Lewison, Duncan Macmillan and Patrick Elliott