Artist's statement:

The four-part Braque etching and drypoint is based on a 1911 Cubist drypoint by Georges Braque. He was dissatisfied with his image and cut up the plate, hoping to find a composition within his composition. He apparently didn't like the result, and did not publish the print. It may have been the unresolved quality of his image that made it so interesting for me to take up as a theme, for variation…

My other inspiration at the time was J. S. Bach's French Suites, brilliant examples of musical variations on a theme. Ideas of many kinds fitted together nicely in these prints! Cubism has a lot to do with seeing things from multiple viewpoints at the same time… This is a notion that is very congenial to me (and to the Canadian experience I think).

The plates for these etchings were very interesting to make, and I spent months preparing them. Cubism is a combination of clear structure and confusing accretions. It moves back and forth between the real world and abstract formalism. So I felt free to amuse myself with different visual manners and technical approaches…. including the traditional etching "look" of techniques like hard ground, soft ground, crayon manner, drypoint, aquatint, engraving, foul bite, roulette, sugar lift, criblé, and so forth.

The printing of the Braque Variations is quite complex. I had to go to the Kätelhön etching shop in Germany to discover with their master printers what colour possibilities there were in the plates. We did variations within variations as new ideas arose out of existing ones.

This work was an exciting adventure for me, and an example of one of the thrills of printmaking… the way your ideas force you to develop new techniques, and then the techniques themselves give rise again to new ideas.

Carl Heywood
August 31st, 2009