I took an intaglio, aquatint class from my friend and printmaker N. Dixon Fish this weekend at the Fallbrook School of the Arts. This was a two day class, and my first one in a little over 25 years. I thought that it would be fun and it was and since I sell a lot of prints and especially like aquatints, it gave me a new understanding of my material.
The method I used for making the aquatint pictured above went something like this. I started with an image I took of the roofline of John Fillmore's house in Santa Fe. I made a drawing in reverse and then used carbon paper to transfer the image to a zinc plate. I selectively covered the white areas with asphaltum and used spray paint to cover other toned areas in various gradations. After each step, the plate went into a nitric acid bath and I swept the plate with a feather. I used an etching tool and added some engraving along the way. I inked the plate, rubbed it with a tarlatan cloth, polished with a page from the phone book and then pulled impressions on the press.
All went swimmingly along until the eighth pull, when something terribly wrong happened to the emulsion layer and I lost a lot of contrast and detail, depressingly. I am going to try again one of these days with a new plate. It will take a while to figure out the tricks and idiosyncrasies of the media.
My favorite aquatint artist are Charles "Chili" Capps, Gene Kloss and Doel Reed. I hope one day to discover their secrets for making such beautiful prints!
But it was fun while it lasted - and I humbly post a picture of one of the intermediate pulls.
4 comments:
Doing this, or any art based exercise, should be a reminder that you will not 'discover' any great shortcuts. The art comes from the process and the process takes an enormous amount of time and dogged hard work. As an art teacher, at this point, I would tell you that if you did the work this semester, you will get a decent grade...show me some work that is the result of.......WORK...lazy SOB.
Weekend workshops.....yikes.....gonna have to come out there and give yehs a bang on the ear.
Hey Teach, never thought I would be Rembrandt out of the box. It's definitely about process. I wouldn't show my obviously flawed innards if I had any illusions about my proficiency in an artform that would obviously take a lifetime to master. Thanks for the decent grade anyway.
...commendable first effort, i suspect your teacher is jealous...
art is your fate.......
don't debate...........
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