Rachel Dauplaise uses printmaking to express her idea that poets are artists like any other. By her illustrations of poems from French symbolism, she works on the idea of artistic freedom. Artists can do what they like in comparing separate objects that seem to have no meaning, and then give them meaning so that they go together symbolically. Rachel’s series is influenced by Henri Toulouse- Lautrec and William Blake. Lautrec created posters and illustrations using lithography, Blake wrote poems and illustrated them using illuminated etchings. This series is executed by using lithography plastic pronto plates.
The specific poems chosen are poems that express artistic freedom. They are poems that express the freedom that artists have in general, with the way that they are able to “fly above the marksman’s aim.” Artists can make what they wish and say what they will because they create the world that they see. Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, the poets chosen, are both well known French symbolist poets who expressed how they saw the world in their poems; the poets also went against the status quo when creating their poetry.
