Nine Views of a Cloud 5, 2015

The reference for this series of mezzotints is a single photograph of a solitary, highveld cumulonimbus cloud in a clear blue sky.

“I find clouds and the sky sublime, a reminder of the transience of the moment, and in the spirit of Caspar Friedrich and the Romantics, a reminder of the awesome force of nature. Clouds are ever-present, ever-changing forms and as such lend themselves to my immersion in the natural processes of transformation and dissolution.” Robyn Penn, 2015

The process of repeatedly reusing a single image has long been an interest of Penn, and the title of this work references the ancient Japanese printmaking practice of obsessively revisiting the same view. There are two different cloud plates used to print this work – some of the images
are a single plate and others are a combination. Additionally, reflective gold pigment and Gampi chine collé (very thin shiny Japanese paper) have been used in some of the images to highlight different aspects of the same cloud. During the collaboration on this work, the final nine images seemed to evolve in many series’ of three, eventually arriving at nine single images that can be hung together as well as floating individually