Nancy Campbell, bespreking in Printmaking Today, vol 16, nr 3 Autumn 2007

PROFILE

Helga Kos has developed a series of prints to accompany a musical setting of Wallace Stevens’ poems.

Helga Kos, a graduate of the prestigious Amsterdam Rijksacademie, describes herself as a painter, though she works in a range of media with integrity and distinction. Ode to the Colossal Sun, her first venture into printmaking, is an artist’s book which incorporates seven of Wallace Stevens’ late poems. It was awarded the accolade of Best Dutch Book Design in 2004, and has been acquired by numerous international collections. Art Larson, formerly Leonard Baskin’s printer at Gehenna Press, described the letterpress section as one of the finest pieces of technical work he had seen. However, Helga did not set out to please letterpress purists or even to make a formal artist’s book’ to fit into that rapidly growing genre. I visited her studio near the Singelgracht in central Amsterdam to talk about this intensive five-year printmaking project.

Helga believes a successful print demands fine draughtsmanship and control of form and colour. She sees this exemplified by Hockney’s work, which she has admired since she too recorded the distorted patterns in swimming pools, although her own paintings suggest more abstract influences. She was hesitant to embark upon printmaking, a medium which seemed to require more detailed planning, and a daunting degree of technical experience. ‘When you paint you can be less precise and just suggest things, but when you print it’s different: you have to chose when you make the colour changes, and you cannot go back. You can put something over it, but you cannot destroy it.’

Helga’s exploration of printing was catalysed by an invitation to exhibit alongside a concert performance of Last Poems of Wallace Stevens by the American composer Ned Rorem. She created some rich gouaches, and later, when asked to make a CD booklet for the recording, she decided to develop the project further. It’s not surprising that Stevens, author of such works as ‘The Ultimate Poem is Abstract’, and analyst of the representation of things, struck a chord with the artist. Inspired by livres d’artistes such as Matisse’s Jazz, he was notoriously finicky about the design of his own publications and his work seems an appropriate subject for graphic experiment.

Theme and Variation
Helga’s experience drawing storyboards for animated movies suggested the possibilities of narrative form. Her concept was to use the book structure to highlight the nature of music as a force existing in time. She wanted to create a visual work ’that has all the elements of music – themes that come back and connect to earlier themes or variations on themes.’ Over 156 pages, images are suggested before and after they appear, using semi-transparent, half-size or perforated paper through which the viewer can see beyond the existing spread. Each section has a different dominant tone, swathes of sombre blues or fold-outs that recall the sun-bleached pinks and yellows of her paintings. A small scarlet circle is a leitmotif, repeated as a lithographed scribble, a silkscreened spot, and even a Velcro fastening for the CD which lurks in the opening sequence, containing the austere and occasionally frenetic chamber music. ‘There is no page existing by itself,’ insists Helga. The three-volume, spiral-bound structure, with its many interconnecting visual references, prevents the images being taken out-of-sequence as they might on gallery walls.

Helga delighted in the physical task of printing. Every fresh development brought ideas unprejudiced by experience. She experimented in the graphic studio of the Rijksacademie, mixing inks, testing papers ranging from delicate kozo to stiff card and pulling flat and folded sheets through the press. ‘I discovered that when using a certain black paper, the ink changed colour, red became bronze, a bright orange turned into real gold and a specific blue popped up as a sparkling dark pink, days after printing.’ She became jokingly known as the ’ten-colour printing machine.’ On one particular spread numerous lino blocks were inked simultaneously with different colours and printed in one revolution of the press, resulting in a geometric pattern of saturated intensity. Offset litho was used for reproductions of gouaches in the final volume, but this return to paint was totally controlled by the print process; Helga doctored the original paintings, so that they, rather than their replication, became the means to an end.

Stories and Non-Stories
These multiple combinations of colour and form arouse strong emotions. Helga sees the audience as an active component of her artwork, and intends the book to induce in each viewer the sense of possibility an artist experiences when creating a project. In an early series of paintings entitled Non-Stories (1995) Helga aimed to create an abstract work ‘which had figurative elements that were so strangely connected that you couldn’t make a story out of them.’ Those canvases gestured towards something elusive or forgotten, like vast landscapes in which we are at once liberated and utterly lost. A recent show, entitled Not Here Not Now (2005) examines similar concerns. If you would just think about a tree now is a lino print in which a woman is half-hidden as if behind a tree, but the absent tree must be imagined as well as the figure’s hidden body. Whether challenging the viewer’s notions of narrative or provoking play, Helga often stands back to let their interpretation take centre stage.

‘Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself’, the last poem in Ode to the Colossal Sun, describes an intangible sound ‘like/A new knowledge of reality.’ Helga’s work, mining layers of reality, ultimately suggests that the ‘real’ may only exist in the individual imagination. She is sceptical of photographic truth and prefers to evoke questions rather than answers, making free use of blank spaces and unfinished lines, inked over or otherwise occluded with multiple crosses or expressive scribbles. In ‘A child asleep in its own mind’ a Victorian studio portrait is overprinted with a pattern reminiscent of oppressive antique wallpaper and panels of colour that leave a glittering residue. She disrupts the primary image because ‘memory is not constructed like a photograph.’ Ode to the Colossal Sun, where no page is free of reference to the others, suggests that the Zen ideal of existing in the present is impossible due to invasive memories or anxieties about the future. Helga explains that there were several instances in which the very nature of the printed process assisted her, for example while printing from lino blocks for the first volume: ‘I noticed that on the sheets that I used to keep the press from staining there appeared beautiful rest forms.’ These protection sheets were saved and used in the final section, ‘A Clear Day’, where they provide a negative image of the borders of earlier prints.

When the book was completed, Helga returned to painting, working on a scale that had been impossible in the pressroom. She doesn’t deny that she now considers printing part of her repertoire and shows me a wall pinned with dynamic, impulsive sketches which she hopes will form the foundations of a new graphic project. However, when I question her further, she smiles mysteriously and hints that her return to printing ‘will be very different.’ Since a project that started as a booklet developed into a monumental three-volume work, who can imagine where this versatile artist will go next?

Ode to the Colossal Sun can be viewed at
Bertram Rota Ltd, 31 Long Acre, London