Praeterita

I recently finished teaching a five-week introduction to etching class. They were five talented and enthusiastic adult participants, all first-timers when it comes to etching, and they all produced interesting prints that used many of the available textures you get with copper plate intaglio. One of my favourites from the class was this image of mother and baby, made with line etching, a light aquatint, and drypoint. It has the feel of one of Mary Cassatt's prints. People ask me if teaching takes anything away from my studio art, and I reply: absolutely not! I love sharing the things that I have learned from 25 years of making art, and I love it even more when I see the discoveries people make. Plus, whatever particular art form I teach (printmaking, drawing, handmade books) invariably makes me find out something new about the medium, or spurs me to make something new for myself.

This is another post where I talk about my own research into how to obtain the best results from non-toxic etching materials -- specifically, the Baldwin Intaglio Ground. This is a form of etching resist developed by printmaker Andrew Baldwin, from the UK, as a non-toxic alternative to the nasty chemicals contained in traditional hard ground and soft ground resists. It comes in a tube, and when you squeeze some out onto an inking slab it looks like etching ink. You roll it onto the copper plate with a brayer, as if you were inking a relief block, in contrast to the traditional hard grounds, which are either melted onto the plate or poured on as a liquid hard ground. Applying the BIG to make a hard ground is relatively easy. Using it as a soft ground can be quite tricky, and it has taken me many tries and many failures to achieve a satisfactory etch. The main problem, unfortunately, is the lack of specific instructions in preparing the BIG soft ground. Andrew Baldwin has some excelle...

The next print that stood out for me during my visit to the Tucson Museum of Art was this etching by Goya (above). It's from his series Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War), a series of etchings he made between 1810 and 1820 depicting the horrors of the Peninsula War that ravaged Spain during the previous decade. This print shows a tangle of corpses in a house that has been destroyed by cannon fire. I notice how Goya still uses classical drawing techniques even while he draws a violent subject form real life: the legs of the man lying on his back in the foreground could easily have come straight from a Renaissance painting. Next, this beautiful etching by German artist Kathe Kollwitz, from the 1890s: The wall text said "etching", but the areas of rich dark tone indicate that she also used aquatint -- and in a brilliantly expert way, too. Look at all that variation in the textures of the shadows between the figures: any printmaker will tell you how much...

One of the first things to catch my eye at the Musee Picasso in Paris was this: the actual copper plate for his etching Weeping Woman, derived from the great painting of the same name. They also had proof prints taken from the plate: It's rare to see the actual copper plates (often because they are supposed to be scored with a big 'X' at the end of en edition, and destroyed). so this was a treat for a printmaker such as what I am. My first thought as to why the plate is so dark: the final layer of ink or resist was left on the plate in the 1940s, and it's hardened over the years. But maybe it was steel-faced, a process that prolongs the life of a copper etching (because copper is a soft metal and wears down much more quickly than steel.) What's great about seeing the plate is how close you get to the process of creation, as you can see every etched line, and engraved line, and ragged fuzzy drypoint line: You also get a real sense of the force of Picas...

Over on my studio blog , a post about a new series of etchings produced using acrylic resist methods:

Over on my studio blog, a report on a tricky printmaking technique: Spit Bite Test

Since I merged two studios into one last year, I've gradually been going through crates of etched steel and copper plates that I've amassed over the years, unwrapping them from their protective layers, cleaning the rust-proof gel off them, and seeing if any of them can be reused. (When I first started to learn intaglio processes in the 90s, large sized copper plates could be had for about $10 each. Now they cost more than $50, because of the rapacious demand of the smartphone industry.) The plate in the photo above is 12" x 14". I covered it with an acrylic resist called Z*Acryl, and drew the image with a drypoint needle. As I was drawing, I noticed that the line wasn't clean and straight, but slightly fuzzy. When I etched the plate in a tray of ferric chloride, I could tell that the lines were not going to be narrow and thin, which holds the ink in a more uniform way. My first proof of the plate after I'd cleaned off the resist, inked it, and print...

I'm moving around in my studio between different projects, which is not a great way to work, as I like to keep up sustained progress over a length of time before moving on to the next thing. I'm trying to finish off some rewards for the Kickstarter Project Patty and I did at the beginning of the year. This set of rewards involves cutting up some 2" x 4"s into short lengths, to which I will glue some small prints. Here they are with a few coats of acrylic varnish on them, and then a layer of airbrush pigment: I am also reusing old plates to make collagraphs, by coating them with layers of acrylic varnish: Finally, I recently consolidated two studios into one (long story, but now everything is in one place in Chicago). I have dozens of etching plates, mainly copper, that have been wrapped and in storage for nearly a decade, so I am trying to clean up six or so at a time, to see which ones can still be used, and which ones can be recycled: ...

Following on from the talk I did a few weeks ago on Alan Sundberg's etchings, here are my thoughts about one of the works that made me study printmaking in the first place.   Subscribe to Praeterita in a reader

Niall Ferguson , writing in Newsweek, has this to say about the global supply of copper: "[T]he key to the copper story is soaring Asian demand. Asians want modern houses with Western-style wiring and plumbing. They want cars. They want electronic gadgetry. So they want copper. In 2005 China accounted for 22 percent of global copper consumption. In 2009 the figure was 39 percent. Try as they may, the copper miners can’t keep pace. And the supply of copper in the world isn’t limitless. Indeed, if the rest of the world were to consume at just half the American per capita rate (1,386 pounds a year), we’d exhaust all known copper reserves within just 38 years." What does this have to do with art? In printmaking, experienced practitioners know that a copper plate is the most luxurious metal for working with. It's a soft metal, so it's easier to work with than steel or zinc, yet it's much tougher than aluminium, which is cheap in most senses of the word. Plus, you c...