While I've been very occasionally traveling between lockdown impositions as well as lifts, I have also been cooking, baking, online teaching (and therefore, sometimes painfully Zooming), and dreaming of a world in which people are free to move about, visibly smile, hug (only if that's their thing!) and see their parents and grandparents (only if that's their thing).
OH, and I've been making art.
For those of you who are familiar with the processes of intaglio (literally translated - carving) printmaking - most specifically, the printing part - you can stop reading now...or you can see how this goes in a non-toxic studio, which is not always the case with printmaking (but is a growing phenomenon).
First, I have to sincerely thank this American institution that is, like all of the others with (and without) campus spaces, currently bereft of students since this pandemic hit Italy back in March.
I have been taking classes - the beginning level of intaglio, as well as an intermediate level printmaking workshop and also bookmaking - among the undergraduates for three terms. When COVID started to become a serious problem last March, all of the undergraduates at Temple Rome were issued orders to leave campus and return home in order to continue their coursework online in what was still thought of as a 'safer' place to be.
The Spouse was scheduled for minor surgery that month, and while his employer wanted him to return to the States for that surgery - contending that the Italian hospitals might become overwhelmed by COVID patients and therefore not handle his surgery capably at the same time - we fought to stay. Our cats would have had to have a substantial amount of paperwork to enter the United States, and there was no time to arrange for it (Italy and her bureaucracy remain famous for having trouble with speed, even at the best of times), and there was no one with whom to leave them indefinitely. We succeeded in our quest to remain. In retrospect, we were right to stay.
Before the inception of the REAL Italian lockdown that kept us all in our homes for several weeks, there was the possibility of movement in the city. Not a whole lot going on, of course, but since Temple Rome had a few staff still going into work, I was allowed to work in the printmaking studio.
Alone.
I suppose that this delicious opportunity only appears so tasty to people who either a) would like a life of 70% introversion balanced with 30% selective extroversion, or b) have had to make art in a studio space where other people are always present, using the same equipment, leaving their own messes and generally getting in the way.
I am both of those people, wrapped up into one.
Before the most severe stage of the lockdown, but when everyone was resorting to teleworking, I would work in my home studio 99% of the time. The 1% involved being notified by my printmaking professor that his dean was going into the office to pick up some work related things and I was permitted the chance to go while she was there in order to also pick up some work/art related things like tools or supplies. That was incredibly generous of them.
And then, the REAL lockdown lasted for three months total. I couldn't go beyond 200 meters away from my building. I only went grocery shopping. Temple's studio space was off limits.
Restrictions were gradually lifted, after those 90 days..
I was allowed to come back and work in the studio.
Again, all alone.
Again, so generous.
A bout of appendicitis, some proposed renovations to the studio (that never materialized because the world is officially a very topsy-turvy place) and various other, lesser impediments arose over the course of the summer, so I have only been able to work in the studio intermittently.
Every time I have been back in there, I work like a demon, racing a pandemic clock.
I never know when another lockdown might happen (although some warning signs are now recognizable), or the few Temple staff still on the premises might need to close early, or who-knows-what-else could occur.
I cannot express how precious this opportunity is.
But here is what I'm doing, 4 or 5 days a week. For hours.
I have about 20 etched plates from which I am making editions of prints.
An edition is a set of identical prints made from the same plate. You know a print has been editioned when you see a fraction at the bottom left side of the image. 1/10 indicates that the print you are seeing is number 1 out of 10 iterations of the same print. Editioning is difficult, as the objective is to make a series of prints as identical to each other as possible - in ink density, paper size and type, and where the plate is centered on the paper.
Step one:
'Carding' the ink on a zinc plate that has already been etched. A stiff card-like material (mat board or book binder's board) is used to push ink (Cranfield, which cleans up with soap and water) across the surface so that it is forced into the lines and marks that are etched into the plate. To try to protect my hands and especially fingernails (traditional printmakers of yore usually have the hands of car mechanics, with black stuff embedded into nail beds that will. not. come. out) I wear gloves. These are of course handy for most printmaking processes, particularly the part involving an acid bath for the plate (not covered in this post).
My plate is totally inked now.
A piece of 'tarletan' - an open-weave, webby fabric intended singularly for this purpose - is bunched up into a kind of jellyfish shape, so that a rounded width of the fabric is ready to take up some of that ink.
The 'jellyfish' is dragged across the inked plate, multi-directionally. The objective is to both push ink into the etched lines of the place AND to remove excess ink from the plate's flat surfaces between the lines.
This can take a number of passes.
I know that I'm close to the next step when the image begins to emerge. The next step is the trickiest, for me.
The wipe with telephone book paper. A sheet is torn from the book and placed against the still-inky surface. The intent is to very gently wipe away the ink from the surface of the plate without removing it from the etched lines and textures in the plate. (you can think of it as the 'wipe-on, wipe off' type of movement, but with less force). If you are too vigorous, you wipe away too much. Not comprehensive enough, you wipe away too little.
The general advice for retaining the right touch is to remove your glove and move the paper side to side across the plate with your bare hand.
But I do not have clammy hands - at all. They are in fact quite dry. I also do not have particularly grippy skin (I don't quite know how else to put this). So my hands just slide over the phone book paper instead of moving the paper over the plate.
Oh sure, the suggestions for solving this include blowing hot breath onto your hands or placing some masking tape on the paper so that there's something for your skin to grip.
These things don't work for me.
So imagine trying to feel that moment when the ink is essentially ONLY removed from the smooth surfaces of the plate and the right amount of ink still remains in the grooved lines and textures...with nitrile gloves on.
You can go through a few sheets of phone book paper on one plate.
But here it is. Almost ready. It looks as if there is no ink, doesn't it?
One more tricky part.
When you buy a zinc plate, it has squared edges. But plate preparation before etching (etching involves allowing acid to penetrate the zinc's surface wherever lines and textures have been drawn) includes scraping and burnishing all four sides of the plate in order to create a beveled edge (roughly a 45 degree angle, pointing upward to the center of the plate). After all the inking and wiping, those beveled edges are also inky. A good print has little to no ink on those edges.
The tricky thing here is to wipe only the beveled edge and not the actual plate.
This is not actually performed quite this way. Since I don't have third hand, I had to free up one of my measly two to take the photo. Typically, the plate is held in one hand while the other wipes the plate's beveled edge.
Either way, this is difficult. There is definitely residual ink on the back side of the plate, and I have to concentrate on not allowing it to smear anywhere.
OK. I have wiped and cleaned and am ready to print. I place the plate on the press bed, which has a registration mylar taped to it. The mylar has two rectangles drawn on it. The smaller one indicates where my plate goes. The larger one indicates where my paper goes.
This makes edition printing go faster and more accurately.
Plate is placed, and the press bed is checked for stray ink smears. An exceptional amount of this process involves chasing ink one way or another, really.
My cotton paper by Fabriano (an art paper company, named for the town in Italy that is historically known for paper making (there will be a different, future post on a field trip there) has been soaking in a water bath.
Out comes the paper, which is allowed to drain and is then placed on this towel backed by a drying felt.
The paper is sandwiched between two ends of the towel.
And a very heavy roller is run over the towel and paper a few times, blotting excess water. But the paper is still somewhat damp. It has to be damp in order to accept the ink from the plate.
Next, the paper is placed carefully on top of the plate, abiding by the drawn lines on my mylar.
To keep the felt blankets on the press clean, two sheets of newsprint are placed on top of the paper and plate.
I then turn the crank to feed the whole thing through the press.
I run this twice - once forward, and once backward.
Back in the original position, the press blankets are lifted.
The newsprint comes up.
The press has exerted enough pressure to create an embossment. You can see the raised edges of the plate.
And finally, the print is revealed.
Perso e Trovato (trans.: <I am> Lost and Found) is a plate that was put through about 6 stages, with soft ground impressions, aquatint, line etching and some drypoint. All that fancy talk means is that I worked in a variety of ways on making the image IN the plate before printing it.
As every cook knows, though, someone's gotta clean up the kitchen.
The plate is removed from the press bed (although a 'ghost' - a much more faint image, because some residual ink actually remains - could be made on another sheet of paper).
A little soapy water and a rag mop up the ink left by the back side of the plate.
And, I begin again. Lather, rinse, repeat. Fortunately, when printing an edition, you don't have to clean the plate between print runs.
Maybe next time, I'll tell you about the paper making workshop that enabled me to make some cool papers on which to print. The lighter gray forms in the image directly above are stenciled shapes of colored pulp embedded in the otherwise white cotton paper.
And here is a day's work, partly comprised of editioning, printing multiples of the same plates, and then doing a little experimentation on handmade paper.
To whoever is reading this, I hope that you are able to do something like this now, something for which you alone can set limits and benchmarks and compete only against yourself, against your last good creation, seeking out a notch higher. It certainly has its own kinds of deprivations - more solitude than you would like, lessened access to the things you typically enjoy - but that kind of time is worth the work. It can prompt you to get out of bed every day. It can take you outside of yourself, in the best way possible.
Gratitude, and hoping for better is about all we've all got.
