My work is an ongoing engagement with European painting from 1400 to 1800. I appropriate elements from carefully selected paintings and combine and juxtapose them through loose mark making with needle, acid and brush. I generally use 4 plates to build up rich layers of colour over colour. Between landscape and the human form, abstraction and figuration my prints explore and open up something in the collective memory of images that can be familiar or obscure, ghost-remnants of icons or scenes that stretch backward in time. I see them as small windows onto a hazy subconscious.

www.stephenlawlor.com