Mercado Cuatro

Mercado Cuatro.
Double-Plate Colour Etching, Relief Roll through Stencil.
40cm x 60cm. 2012.

Yikes, this piece got really busy and colourful! But it's a market, so I think it works. Considering it's the Mercado Cuatro in Asunción, I could even call this piece very organized. This is the last image that I will translate from a painting into a print. I sold the painting a couple of years ago (to a wonderful new owner), but I missed it a little and I decided to make it into a print once again. I also wanted to add it to my body of work about Paraguay. I'm still working towards having an exhibition in my home country one day. A trip to the Mercado Cuatro is a must for me every time I am in Asunción. (Well, it's been three years since I visited home last time, so it's been a while.) It is such a wonderful adventure every time. First the trip in a rickety old bus at break-neck speed in crazy traffic along cobble stone streets that rattle your bones and seem to shake every screw loose that still holds the bus together. Then walking, wandering and meandering through the busy and chaotic paths and sidewalks packed from the floor to the sky with everything imaginable: fresh fruit and vegetables, clothes, shoes, bras, underwear, canteens, fabrics, herbs, etc, etc, etc. I tried to take some photographs, but some of the older women waved me off and grumbled quite a bit, so I wanted to respect that and I didn't have the courage to shoot them anyways. One was an older woman balancing a giant bag of garlic on her head. The other one was the old, wrinkly herb seller drinking Tereré and rolling her cigars. But, I saved them in my memory and here they are in my print.
The print was pulled from two copper plates; one inked with reddish ink, the other black. For each plate I cut out a stencil from acetate through which I rolled the yellow and the blue onto the surface of the wiped plate. I describe this process in more detail in an earlier post about Entre Itacurubí y San José if you want to read up on it again.