ARTISTS PROOF: PRINTS AND DRAWINGS
As a child sitting alone in my room, I pondered the hippos and whales in frames on the walls. These objects had a quality different from objects in three dimensions; they were flat and still, but were nevertheless animated in a mysterious way. I have since spent much time working with pictures, although I may be no closer to penetrating their mystery.
One of the things we can ponder about pictures is how they were made. In this exhibit, we have the chance to compare pictures with very different etiologies. Artists have chosen media that for whatever reason appeal to them as a lifelong pursuit; others as a solution to a present need. Either way, a kind of mastery develops and a work of art is the result.
Tim Daly's charcoal drawing employs one of the oldest and simplest methods: rubbing something dirty on a slightly bumpy surface. Tim was able to evoke a sense of interior light with his skillful use of charcoal.
Nancy Cohen draws, too, but with paper pulp on handmade paper sheets. She calls them pulp drawings, and many approach 8 feet square and often refer to her 3D pieces. Tomomi Ono rubs oily crayon onto a stone she has ground to perfect flatness. Then she treats the stone chemically with a mixture of nitric acid and gum Arabic to stabilize the image for printing. She removes the drawing mediums from the stone with solvent and replaces them with ink. And then she rolls oil based ink over it after sponging the surface with water, which is repelled by her marks, allowing the ink to stick there. She uses a press to squeeze paper to the stone, creating a lithographic print.
Suzanne Scherer and Pavel Ouporov (an artistic duo), Jessica Lenard, Bruce Waldman and Elizabeth Harington all make intaglio prints, or etchings. They coat a metal plate with a resist and draw skillfully and idiosyncratically thru the resist with a stylus. Then they etch the plate with acid, which dissolves the drawing out of the metal. When ink is rubbed on and off the plate, it sticks in the drawing crevices and not the rest of the plate. A wet piece of paper is pressed onto the plate with a powerful press, pushing the paper fibers into the engraved areas and absorbing the ink into the fibers. The artists also add tone to the print in various ways, such as by adding metal particles (aquatint) creating more surface to hold washes of ink rather than lines.
Some of the etchings have been scanned and printed large on similar if not identical papers to reveal the corrosive details. I call these expanded etchings. This process was developed when I worked with Elizabeth Harington in the 1990's. There is sometimes a violent world hidden within an etching.
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