Praeterita

I am spending four days this week in Texas, where I have been invited to teach a solarplate intaglio workshop to printmaking students at a community college just outside Dallas. I've been to Texas a few times, but this is my first time in this area. From my twenty four hours here so far, Dallas appears to be an endless veldt of single story buildings, covering every inch of a gently undulating ochre coloured landscape, in every direction, as far as the eye can see. As my hosts drove me back from the airport to their home in a suburb forty miles away, I saw the same thing you see in every American suburban streetscape: highways thronged with cars, driving past shopping malls with Best Buy and Target stores, Starbucks, Radio Shacks, clothing stores, and so on. And megachurches -- so many of them that I lost count, behemoth constructions capable of holding 6,000 people, sometimes standing two abreast on the highways. That equals a lot of evangelical Christians, my friends. Supp...

Last Friday was the final day of the printmaking class that I taught at the adult workshop of the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. The students were a little doubting that we would get a four print edition of a reduction linocut finished by the end of the afternoon, but I drove them like mules and we got it done. The slideshow below is from all stages of the day: cutting the first marks on the blocks, inking and printing the first colour, cutting the second stage, inking and printing, and so forth; up to the point when they signedf and numbered the two editions they printed this week. With the solarplate prints from the first half of the week, added to the reduction linocut prints, each person made between 18 and 22 prints each -- a very good haul, I think. Congratulations to Ava, Ashley, and Ginny for pulling through, and for occasionally teaching me a few things, too. That is one of the great things about a printmaking studio, by the way: people of all levels of experience ar...

Day 3, in which I helped the participants complete a 5-print edition of their solar plate images. Next, reduction linocuts.

On the second day, we had another person join the class, and we were quickly doing two plate prints of solarplate intaglio, with me acting as studio boss and master printer.

It was solarplate intaglio all day, in the bright sunshine of northern Michigan. We were indoors and outdoors all day long, starting with drying off the ink drawings on the acetate (click on any of the following images to display larger versions): Then we exposed the solarplate for a few minutes with an aquatint screen over them, to create that first 'tooth' for the image to adhere to: Next, exposing the acetate image over the aquatinted solarplates, for just over three minutes: I posted online earlier a picture of Ava's plate drying afterwards in the sun. Here is Ashley's: And then the prints (these photos show their second plates): On the lower image, there is a grey circle created by a drop of water hitting the solarplate before it was exposed to the sun. It turned into one of those errors that gets incorporated into the final plate and ends up looking quite good. We printed two plates for each participant, and they all came out with a great,...

This is where I will be teaching a printmaking class this week. It's the Mallory-Towsley center for the arts, purpose built for the Interlochen College of Creative Arts for their adult programs: It's at the north end of the Interlochen campus, which means in order to get there from my cabin in the woods, I have to walk past all the cabins in which the musical students of the young people's summer camp are practising their instruments. I'm teaching solar plate intaglio first, and the weather forecast looks good for the next two days. Pictures of the first prints to follow...

I've been reacquainting myself with solarplate etching recently, in preparation for teaching a 2-day workshop about the technique in a couple of weeks time. With some invaluable advice from my internet friend William Evertson , I got a great result yesterday on one of the plates. A solarplate is a thin sheet of metal coated with a light sensitive photo-emulsion. When you place an image on a piece of acetate against the emulsion and place it in the sun, the dark parts of your image get exposed onto the plate. You then simply wash away the unexposed parts of the emulsion under warm tap water, leaving behind an etched image. What I realised in recent experiments is that I needed to make an aquatint on the plate first (basically, creating a 'tooth' on the plate that will ultimately hold more ink). So I made my own aquatint screen by printing out a dot matrix pattern on a piece of acetate, then exposing that against the plate first, followed by a piece of acetate with the im...