Around 1980, graphic art turned suddenly to darker tones. Having embraced white etched backgrounds (more difficult to render in linocuts) in the 1970s and black and white intaglio prints in the 1980s, artists became enamored with darkness. Printing presses at the Artists’ Union and the Art Institute refined aquatint and mezzotint processes—the application of acid or other physical means to make etchings in copper plates to give a print a deep velvety or sooty blackness. Strange creatures that could only be conjured in one’s imagination emerged from the darkness from beneath the black dome of a skull. Black meant night, but it also meant fantasy and the subconscious, intoxication, nothingness, or a sleeping mind that gave birth to monsters. At the same time, it symbolized the approaching end of Soviet society with its nihilism, discomfort, fear and despair. The saying “it is darkest before the dawn”applies here for good reason.

 

Among the first to create disturbing imagery in the darkness of aquatint was Stasys Eidrigevičius, a student of the Art Institute, who was already designing intaglio print miniatures and ex libris in the 1970s. Soon thereafter, grisly creations (the faces of prisoners trapped in a turtle’s armored caissons, a face overgrown with roots, a centipede made of humans or an insect with a woman’s legs perched atop a tower) began to emerge from the darkness of etchings by Danutė Gražienė. Nijolė Šaltenytė created similar works: darkness creeping up like a black cat, a bizarre half-dead city plunged in the gloom, a cloud lord feeding on rat flesh, or a blackened pond full of swimmers. In the dimness of Rimvydas Kepežinskas’ prints we see an endless drama of tiny people wearing long robes and conical hats, as if played out on a darkened stage. The darkness is auspicious for the characters here, but it is not essential—they could easily be transferred to the white pages of poetry.

 

No less mysterious than the mezzotint prints are the linocut creations by Edmundas Saladžius, telling stories of night and death. The blackness of his silkscreen and monotype prints is also not simply an abstract background of lines, as in the works of Vincas Kisarauskas, but seems to possess notional depth, igniting light and feeding a flame that allows a bloody corpse to glow.

 

Though lithograph prints may be rendered white as in a sketch, they sometimes can darken as a result of technical errors. We don't know for sure, for example, if the action taking place at Vilnius University as depicted by Birutė Staničkaitė was truly meant to occur at night, but the giant heads with gaping black eye sockets in prints by Danutė Jonkaitytė are clearly creatures of the darkness, while the night shrouds her otherwordly landscapes. Traditional rituals and folk song motifs intertwine to resemble one whole living creature, taking on disturbing new traits as a result, in the dark series of lithographs by Ramunė Vėliuvienė entitled Kalendorinės lietuvių šventės (Holidays of the Lithuanian Calendar). The drama of shifting light became an enduring central element in Vėliuvienė's etchings.

A popular trend took hold following the re-establishment of Lithuanian independence that ran contrary to the illusion of reality and which is perhaps best described as the inclusion of marginal notes: lines of text or symbols inscribed into the surface of a print, serving as elements of a diary, document, or a series of citations or study observations. They were meant to be read more than observed, illustrating not only the nature of the visual medium’s surface (a white piece of paper), but also the boundaries of graphic art or any type of visual illustration, and also served to encourage the viewer to explore the relationship between images and the language of words.

 

For Petras Repšys, prints became daily notes of secondary importance as he painted his famous frescoes in the halls of Vilnius University—liberating the new works from the confines of tradition. When he began work on his series of etchings entitled Improvizacijos (Improvizations) in 1972, Repšys carved studies of natural objects or strange images that suddenly came to mind into zinc plates. These illustrations were supplemented by barely legible texts, printed in reverse, that served to further emphasize the print’s surface. The series of etchings Dienoraštis (Diary, 1987) captures everyday experiences: impressions of reality, objects seen in museums, overheard sayings, texts found by the artist. An erratic composition reveals the element of time—the course of a day’s events and their rendering in sketches—and thus also helps to reveal the creative process. In a series of drypoint etchings created while in Finland and Denmark, Repšys demonstrates the diversity of connections between images and words, as strings of text replace lines to shape human figures, the landscape space, architectural elements. After a visit to the United States in 1995, Repšys returned with a stack of large-format colored drawings that resembled an illustrated encyclopedia of one explorer’s observations.

 

At the end of the 20th and the start of the 21st centuries, graphic artists took interest in illegible characters, traces of time left on surfaces, graffitied walls or notebook motifs, calligraphy and old maps. Intentionally unfinished etchings appear like the pages of a traveling artist’s sketchbook. Embossed works transformed into puzzle-like images of stamped wood blocks that demolished the myth of rough form and expressed the political views of their creators. Mechanical copying, an integral part of graphic art technique, became a matter of principal: some (like Repšys) attempted to forego it altogether, while others transformed it into an essential creative strategy.

 

Using images they observed, imagined or discovered on the internet, Birutė Zokaitytė, Eglė Kuckaitė, Eglė Vertelkaitė, and Laisvydė Šalčiūtė disassembled and explored the norms of femininity. Noble or banal paintings of women eventually transformed into images of the artists themselves, speaking in the first person. The creative pursuits by these female artists took place not so much in their minds, but on the surface of their works, which is why they attached great importance to the emptiness of the page and the visible space of ideas. Erratic assemblies of different motifs and seemingly random parallels compelled viewers to explain their interrelationship in words. Their correlation was sometimes revealed in notes or the elaborate titles of each work. The union of image and text, pop cultural references and artistic exploration proliferated in the works by artists of all generations.

 

Audrius Puipa described imagery in his watercolors with a feigned naiveté:

 

 

Kiaulės pjovimas Šešuoliuose (Slaughtering a Pig in Šešuoliai), 1986–1991

 

The depicted imagery becomes visible because of references or traces of them, along with the empty spaces in the work’s foundation.