Shades of White and Cream

In my first etching class, I believe I was told about three etching papers-Rives BFK, Arches, and I can't remember the other one-I think it was one of the student grade papers. This was sometime around 1990 or so, and just this week I get around to doing a side by side caparison of most of the papers that I have frequently used or those that have piqued my interest over the years. As I mentioned earlier, I have quite a back up of completed prints that need editioned and this comparison has been a long time coming. I want to find the best sheet for my imagery. I generally use dense aquatints, and the plates are heavily worked. I ordered the sample book from Graphic Chemical, then several larger sheets of the most promising candidates and those not represented in the sample book.

Part of this experiment stems from Tim Berry at SFAI, who highly recommended I go with cream or off white papers to enhance the richness of blacks and bring out the highlights. I think he is absolutely right, but I got into a BFK Cream rut. I've been using primarily BFK Cream and Somerset over the past five years or so, until my recent refresher course at PNCA with Michael Southern, who turned me on to Fabriano Rosapina.

So I printed the same small image on the following: Hahnemuhle Copperplate Warm White, Magnani Pascia Soft White, Johannot, Sommerset Velvet Antique, Sommerset Velvet Soft White, Rives BFK White, Rives BFK Cream, Fabriano Rosapina White, Fabriano Rosapina Cream, and Copperplate Zerkall. The results are difficult to draw 100 percent conclusions from, because I have to account for the possibility of uneven wiping from plate to plate, but for my purposes, the favorites are Somerset Velvet Soft White and Hahnemuhle Copperplate Warm White. Really, it confirms the fact that the slighly off whites work best for me, and I love the warmth of these two. Pescia is delightful, too. And I am enamoured still of the Rosapina, especially for line engravings. If anyone knows of papers I should add to this experiment list, I would love to hear suggestions. Somehow I skipped over German Etching, Arches, and. . .

I'm not sure I understand the Zerkall. I printed them all at the same pressure, and that is the only paper that seemed brittle around the plate mark. There really were no "bad" papers, but the Rives BFK white was the least favorite for my work. It is the paper I cut my teeth on, too, but I read on the Inkterraction discussion that the formula was changed in recent years, so maybe it is different from (twenty!) years ago. Conversly, I have used Rives BFK cream, per Tim Berry's advice, and continue to love it, though it is too dark for some of the work. . . maybe.

Hard decisions. But what interested me most about this experiment was cutting largeish, equal sized pieces of these papers and seeing them side by side. The colors were as varied as Martha Stewart's eggs. Gorgeous array. Reminded me of that old art school exercise of painting a picture of "white" eggs. There is no white, only shades of white. Now for testing the blacks and Japan papers for chine colle-

Here I come sheepishly back to the blog. I've been terrible about posting, but have not been terrible about working. I come through to the other side having figured a lot out! A couple people commented on the earlier posts and I never saw the comments because I abandoned the blogging for forum searches and desperate research. So sorry. I wish I had seen them, because we printmakers need one another's society! Really, that's where I've been-consorting with printmakers on Inkteraction, on the Graphic Chemical forum (Thanks, Dean Clark!), and taking a great class with Michael Southern at Pacific Northwest College of Art. I was also blessed by a generous correspondence with the great engraver, Evan Lindquist, which has forever changed the way I approach the plate. So, as I've said, I have some solutions, much through the help of these many generous individuals, and some by banging through problems until an answer came.

I turned forty last week, I was born in 1969. I graduated from San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, I think, so it has been five years of struggles and set backs with flashes of sustaining ecstacy. Who am I kidding, though? I am a printmaker, "work is my salvation" as the poet Micheael Hannon said of the mole. I am very happy scraping and burnishing in my hidey hole for hours on end, and so I have.

I hope to share here some of what I learned, because maybe I can help people save some time in setting up the home studio, if only through avoiding some of the same mistakes. I've discovered etching in a college facility is one thing, but setting yourself up to do it by yourself requires a whole new set of skills, ones that aren't necessarily presented in classes.

Now, I still know next to nothing about the marketing aspect of printmaking-that is my next frontier- I hope that the worst of the hazing is through now and I can just work. Already the pace of my work has gone up, but this is not only to do with having figured things out, but life circumstances. The past several years have been chaotic, with several moves, a baby boy (now almost four), and now two salukis. . . and a tree frog I rescued from a pool that was to be drained. Anyway, now we are settled back in the Bay Area (Thank God!) and I am now finally finishing a suite of prints that have been in the works for five years.

If You'd Only Clapped Your Hands Hard Enough

I think it was a character in a Jules Feiffer play that had this monologue about how when she was a girl watching Peter Pan there was an incident when Peter was trying to work with the kids in the audience to clap really, really hard to revive Tinkerbell after some great drain on the magic in children's hearts or something. Peter was running around frantically, yelling to get the kids to clap, and they clapped their hearts out, but Peter checked and it wasn't enough. . . Tinkerbell was dead. That's how I'm starting to feel about green printmaking. Oh, I don't want to. I'm clapping my heart out. It is not part of the great plot that the good thing to do won't work, but my, is Tink looking green-and not in a good way. Which is to say, I am invested in this working-so any help anyone can give me-I promise will be turned out to the greater good-like fairy dust. (Did I see her eyes flutter?)

I've put up a couple of test plates comparing Future floor wax and Lascaux hard ground as grounding on copper plates. I've been using the Future (as in Keith Howard's method) for a couple of years now and it has worked-flaked off badly (thick, brittle lines) at the edges (yes, despite copious degreasing), but worked. The edges issue has just been a bear, though, as I've been spending hours scraping and burnishing, so I've been very excited about trying the Lascaux hard ground-so much so that I invested in the full line of their products.

I really want these products to work, so if anybody out there has an idea of what I am doing wrong, please enlighten me! What I've found so far with Lascaux leaves me a bit disheartened. First off, I find that I cannot draw through the hard ground with the blackener on it-the needle sticks and jerks. Now, it may be the brush I use to apply the ground, but as it is a good quality flat brush, that is hard to imagine. And the stop out, which you are supposed to be able to draw through, well-if you want a slug of a line through it, you can. Also, the soft ground is not sensitive enough to work in the traditional way (drawing on paper laid on the plate). I followed the directions on the web, but found large chunks of the soft ground peeling up as I removed the drawing. So I waited (you can treat it like a hard ground after the open working time) and it drew through beautifully (though really hard to see the lines-clear film over copper), as I stopped out and lined in the missing part of the drawing. Well, the lines drawn in later, like hard ground, came out beautifully-the soft ground disappeared utterly. Help! In exasperation this afternoon after this final disappointment, I stalked out to the little red house out back to ground a plate with (gasp!) an asphaltum hard ground. It felt really good. People, I want to be green. But its not easy. Not without lots of help, not without community. Hell, even with the deadly toxic stuff you need lots of help. Oh, for an apprenticeship that would work with a toddler in tow.

As for help! There is a great forum I've found at Graphic Chemical where Dean Clark, Carol Robertson and other printers out there share their experience and advise on printing matters. Dean Clarks answers on the forum verge on poetry, and he has a blog I've linked to on this page. Robertson has put out a book : "Intaglio: Acrylic-Resist Etching, Collagraphy, Engraving, Drypoint, Mezzotint" that I've ordered off of Amazon and am very excited about.

Non Toxic Etching-Waivering Faith

It has been several years since I graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a degree in printmaking. It was a second degree-a chance to get it right and do what I had always wanted to do. . . which makes me think of this poem, which I know is seen a lot, but nevertheless I quote in its entirely here:

Dream Deferred

"What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?"

by Langston Hughes

Anyway, there I learned all the gorgeous, traditional etching techniques and found my medium in etching. I also became increasingly frightened of its toxic side. The first time through college etching (when I was 18 and immortal) there was no anxiety about the poisons in the etching studio but later in my thirties when I breathed in Nitric Acid or Dutch Mordant fumes, sucked down rosin and talc powders, absorbed laquer thinner and mineral spirits, cadmiums-God knows what else-I couldn't avoid thinking about when or if I was going to get around to having a baby and once I did would I mind if all the chemicals had given the baby two heads. Oh, yeah, I love the chemicals they gave me - grounds you could glide through, blackest aquatints, spit bites as easy as water color, effortless clean up and that great, moving studio smell (plus, we know there is a real machismo out there about self protection and art materials). I could have continued working that way forever- But like I said. it was later in life for me, and I knew I needed to find a way to etch that I (and any other critters in the world around me) could live with. I needed to learn how to etch safely.

So upon graduating and trying to get pregnant I started down the short (historically) but uphill road through the world of non-toxic (or less toxic) printing. So, one baby, one dog, three houses, three cities and three years later, I am still trying to find what works for me. To be honest, I often wonder if the years more life I get by working with these non-toxic materials will compensate for the ten years it takes me to get a satisfying print out of them! An exaggeration, as I have been pleased with some results I've gotten. They were hard won-hence the name of the blog "Hard Ground". But that is what I hope to do here -I want to share what is working for me among the techniques and products I've tried, and it is my greatest hope that you other printers out there will contribute so we can get this thing down-and talk about what really matters-the work! Maybe a little of both.

This is a Trillium. We saw trillions.

Jumping in

We were out hiking today. Thought that new leaves resembled exclamation points - whole flocks, flocks of Biblical proportion, of green exclamation points.

There was a sound installation there, at the Trillium trail. Art is best in nature, which is why gardens work-makes nature feel less indifferent-people putting music into the trees-Yes, it feels right. Of course there should be music coming from the trees, the ground, poetry coming out from under it all.