About twenty years ago, I was in the second or third week of a course in intaglio etching. This was the first printmaking I had ever done, and I was taking the class with a German master printer called Thomas Gosebruch at his studio near King's Cross station in London. I've blogged about him a few times, and every now and then when I teach my own printmaking classes, I recount the moment during one of those first classes when Thomas looked at one of my earliest prints, sighed and said: "You haff completely misunderstood the entire process."
I was unpacking more old etching plates in my studio recently, and to my surprise I found the very plate that he was talking about. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the first etching that I ever did. As far as I can remember, it's a hard ground etching on a 10" x 12" steel plate. After cleaning off the layer of protective grease, and getting rid of a little rust, I inked and printed the plate, and this is what I got:
I guess it's a quick still life of a bottle and some other things on top of a studio table. The lines are indeed thick for a hard ground, so that they etched more like an engraving. But for a first ever etching, I think it's not bad. And the proof that I took today is as good as when I first made the etching 20 years ago.
By way of comparison, here is one of my most recent etchings -- the latest step in a two-decades old journey:
I was unpacking more old etching plates in my studio recently, and to my surprise I found the very plate that he was talking about. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's the first etching that I ever did. As far as I can remember, it's a hard ground etching on a 10" x 12" steel plate. After cleaning off the layer of protective grease, and getting rid of a little rust, I inked and printed the plate, and this is what I got:
By way of comparison, here is one of my most recent etchings -- the latest step in a two-decades old journey:
