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.

I've just finished teaching a First-Time Etching class at Lillstreet Art Center, here in Chicago, and here are some of the prints created by my students. Click on an image to display it at full size. First, a detailed line etching with 2 rounds of aquatint: Next, an abstract design of line etch plus aquatint, printed a la poupee: And then four stages of a line etching which the student put together in one frame: Nice!

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...

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 was at the Art Institute of Chicago last Thursday, taking students around a few exhibitions, including the great Picasso show. The centerpiece of the Picasso exhibition, at least for me, is the section devoted to complete sets of his prints from the twenties and thirties -- the Vollard Suite, the etchings based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and Balzac's "Le Chef d'Ouevre Inconnu." There's nothing like intaglio printmaking for the variety of lines and marks and the range of tones you can make. So over the weeked I got together some materials in my studio and did something I haven't done in ten years: an etching and aquatint intaglio print. I started with a steel plate, upon which I painted a 'coal circle' (see previous posts) design using a sugarlift solution. My recipe for sugarlift, by the way: 2 parts corn syrup, 2 parts washing up liquid, one part india ink. The washing up liquid causes the line to smear and break up, and it al...

I moved studios nine days ago,and am currently in the middle of setting things up in the new space. It's a process that will probably take until the end of the month, which in turn means that I won't get seriously into making new work until March. This is one of the reasons why I postponed moving from my last studio in Wicker Park, even though that one had been very unsuitable for me for a long time: I hate the whole moving thing, the waste of time involved in packing up boxes, throwing things out, moving, and unpacking the boxes at the other end. But it's done, and now I have a clean slate to set up a new space in the way I want, and to try to get it right this time. The ceilings are very high in this space, so no more scraping the flesh off my scalp like I did many times in the previous space. I've got a printmaking area set up already (see photo above), and on Sunday I decided to give it a test drive, using an etching that I made in 1998: It's a four i...

I've been teaching printmaking classes in the past year, and people have asked me where I studied. I tell them that I learned intaglio etching with a German artist called Thomas Gosebruch, when I was living in London. Thomas told me that he had worked for a while in the workshop of Aldo Crommelynck, who was one of the great master printers of the twentieth century. Crommelynck worked side by side with some of the greatest artists of the School of Paris - Arp, Giacommetti, Miro, Braque - helping them prepare their etching plates, making technical suggestions, etching the plates, then proofing the prints and printing the editions. In the 1960s, Crommelynck helped Picasso produce as many as 750 etchings, including the notorious 347 series, in a final masterful statement in a medium that Picasso had always loved. One of the reasons that I had decided to study printmaking was because of prints such as Picasso's. One in particular, Blind Minotaur Being Led by a Girl, I had known lo...