Night Tracings Etchings

LINES

I fell in love with intaglio before I ever picked up an etcher’s needle. From the very first moment that a fellow student showed me a freshly pulled print I knew this was something I just had to do. There was a richness to the image incomparable to anything else I’d seen. The means of production seemed nothing less than alchemy. Despite my ensuing passion, technique never became more than a means to an end for me. Lacking the compulsion to follow rules, show off my expertise, or do something new for its own sake, I began turning out many one of a kind prints just because it suited my exploration of the expressive and conceptual. If there was a unifying factor it was that all were imbued with mysterious undercurrents. Asking questions without ever providing answers became an essential element to my work. By the mid-1980s I began experimenting with the landscape to represent an inner state a mind rather than a specific place. Though intrigued by the possibilities, this pursuit was cut short when I unexpectedly lost access to the printshop I was using. I did not pick up the needle again until 1992 when I began the enterprise of supplying small black & white landscape etchings of the New England coast to galleries stretching from Mystic Connecticut to Bar Harbor Maine. Five years later, after finding a venue for my etchings in New York City, my focus began shifting toward more urban scenes.

Over time, I began moving away from what I thought was expected of me to pursue a more inward vision. While well known landmarks still pop up in my prints, they are no longer the subject of my work. The places in my etchings are points of translation, places where the land speaks to me and can be put into a visual language through etching. These are significant places, not because of their history but because they represent the soul of what the city truly is, something that rests deeper than what is found in popular tourist attractions. While my work is representational, it is not meant to document in the traditional sense. I am more concerned with capturing a sense of place to invite my audience to open their eyes.

Below are two separate links for my New York and selected New England Prints. Each link has multiple pages. The prints in each are displayed in chronological order. New work will be added to the top of the highest numbered page. All prints were made solely through line etching unless otherwise noted.

	New York
	New England

HOW AN ETCHING IS MADE

The etching process is an old one; an intaglio technique that has changed little over the past four hundred years. This type of print is pulled from an incised sheet of metal, just thick enough to hold a mark. Copper is the traditional substrate though etchings can be made on other metals as well. Each has its own characteristics, requiring different acids or mordants to process, which produce different types of lines as a result. My etchings are made on zinc, a substance whose peculiarities I have become familiar with. This substrate, referred to as a plate, is first coated with a varnish called a ground. Etching grounds can be made in many different ways but they must all be capable of being easily scratched off while at the same time retaining their acid resistant quality. Ingredients often include asphaltum for color and body, rosin for hardness and durability, and bees wax for pliability. If dried into a ball, grounds can be applied to a heated plate with a leather hand roller. I prefer to use grounds suspended in solvent so they cam be applied with a brush. Once dry, a drawing can commence using any type of pointy metal stylus. Since all needles generally produce the same type of line, choice comes down to how comfortable the tool feels in the hand.

Intaglio means to incise, and metal plates can be cut into in many ways. The art of engraving, cutting directly into the metal with a graver requires much skill. Etching is closer to drawing because the needle only needs to scratch through the ground on the plate’s surface to expose the metal underneath. When the drawing is finished, the zinc plate is placed in a bath of diluted nitric acid, which only dissolves the metal where the needle has exposed it. This is called biting. The longer the plate remains in an acid bath the more metal is dissolved. The deeper the bite, the more ink it will eventually hold to produce a darker line. When the lines have been etched to their desired depth, the ground is washed off and the plate is ready for printing.

Printing begins with a tacky ink being spread over the entire top surface of the plate and then rubbed into the bitten lines. Tarlatan is used to wipe excess ink off the plate’s smooth non-etched surface with care being given not to pull too much ink out of the lines. Since this entire process is performed by hand and some inky residue called plate tone is always left behind, each print will contain slight variations. A rolling press is employed to transfer the ink remaining in the lines to paper. First the plate is placed on the metal press bed that rests between two heavy rollers. A sheet of paper, dampened so it can stretch under pressure is placed on top. Tightly woven felt blankets are used to protect the paper and help to force it into the lines for a better transfer. After this sandwich is cranked between the rollers, the paper, now holding a finished print is lifted off the plate. The plate must be re-inked and re-wiped for every additional print desired. Each copy is given its own number, which is written before the edition number that indicates the total number of images that will be printed.

Although the basics of intaglio always remain the same, there are many nuances to the process that allow individual artists to approach it in an individual manner to achieve a wide variety of lines, tones, and textures. While I’ve studied and experimented with a number of techniques, my work has come to rely on line etching, largely due to its simple elegance. The process itself remains very indirect having to draw my image in reverse in silvery lines that will print black through a dark ground that prints white. If this were not difficult enough, I also take the less conventional approach of drawing only one set of tonal values at a time before placing the plate in an acid bath. My plates are typically immersed about fifteen times before they are ready for printing, but this deliberate process creates an exceptionally wide tonal range. Etching is also a very unforgiving medium. Mistakes are difficult to reverse so I usually have most of the image finished in my mind before the first line is ever drawn. Few artists are comfortable working this abstractly, not actually making a print, only a substrate capable of producing an image when printed. I am constantly amazed whenever an entire finished picture magically appears before my eyes.