learning to control the ink

I did a double-run print today, experimenting with opaque paints and the idea of an underlayer to a top-layer composition. The two plates are on the left in the photo, the underlayer plate at top and the "drawing" plate underneath. At the top right is the intended print, clearly too dark with too much ink. At the lower right is a single-run print that I took off of the already printed "drawing" plate, with an interesting atmosphere but not my original intention.

In principle, my method worked. The underlayers did show through, as I wanted. The problem was in the second plate, whose colors were too close in value and too heavily laid down to give the effect I sought. How to lighten up that second plate? Thinner layers? Greater distinctions in value? Clearer marks?

This was done in Gamblin relief ink.

saturation

An exploration of how much pigment a piece of dampened paper will accept produced the print at left. I used brayers for the flat areas, and brushes and Colour Shapers for the detail work. I am happy with the flatter areas, and especially the nuances in the large blue shape at top. The smaller marks were more problematic: I had less control than I wanted, and did not manipulate the paint well in the central areas. I also applied it too thickly in places for the effects that I wanted. This has caused problems before: I forget to think about what will happen to thickly applied ink when it goes through the press. In part, I don't know how much will get absorbed and how much will get pushed along. Brayers almost automatically produce a thin layer of paint on the plate, but handwork, as it were, produces clumps and lumps that smear when pressed. I wanted those central shapes to be clear rectangles and squares rather than the mushy forms that happened, but I couldn't get the ink to lie flat in such small spaces. A lot of thoughtful practice lies ahead.

Creating monotypes is deceptively painterly, since the main creative work consists of applying ink/paint to a plate. The most salient difference from direct painting on canvas or board is the fact that the resulting print is a mirror image of the painted plate. Yet there are clearly more subtle differences in the actual application of the color to the surface. I need to develop a printer's mentality and orientation, which has led me to decide to let my cold wax medium work lie dormant for a while, and to concentrate on printmaking. Fortunately, there is much useful information on the Web and in the few books I've found on monotypes. Unfortunately, I don't always know what information to seek. This is truly a trial-and-error process for me.

technique and message

I still haven't broken out the inks for creating my monotype plates, but instead have explored using larger plates than before (16"x20", left, and 10"x14", below) while still enjoying the Gamblin oil paints with which I am familiar. In part, I just wanted to play, though I also seem to be limited to trying one new aspect of printmaking at a time. Baby steps. Producing these slightly larger prints presented no procedural problems: the paper dampened evenly, the plates went onto the press easily, the printing process was uneventful, and the prints turned out quite well. I was focused on these technical aspects rather than artistic questions, so I am content.

In fact, I even borrowed ideas for these pieces, deriving my compositions from paintings I've seen and admired in magazines and books. They allowed me to try new techniques, using stencils, stamps, simple marks (both additive and subtractive), oil sticks, and spritzing, at left, and trying to draw a bit on the slippery plexiglass, below right. These are works that I will not sell; they shall become part of my private archive.  They will be useful as future reference, and they were fun to make.They are not copies, but they are derivative, and indeed do not carry any message that is meaningful to me beyond being attractive and engaging.

This does raise, once again, the artistic question of what it is that I want to paint. I fully acknowledge that simply changing materials and processes is not the answer to the question of why I am painting. But this time, in contrast to the self-inspection as I began to work with oil and cold wax medium a few years ago, I am willing simply to work with the materials and to see what comes from them. At least, that is what I am telling myself. I am on the one hand rather tired of my Colorado Plateau layering paradigm, though on the other hand, it is also familiar and comfortable and still interesting. But my attraction to monotype is in part a desire to try something new, to find a new way to express my affinity for the natural world and the beauty and peace that I find in it. I still want to produce pieces that invoke calm and pleasure in the viewer, and it makes far more sense to paint from the country that I know and love rather than from my imagination. But maybe through printmaking I will get away from my geometric, dense approach and find a different and fresh way to express what I want to say.

Gamblin inks

The inks I ordered from Gamblin and Akua have arrived, but I am not enthusiastic about trying them. I am enjoying my oil paints so much that I am reluctant to leave them, and I am not sure why I need to. But all the literature talks about using inks, and I remember David Dornan all those years ago in Helper having us use inks for multiple-pass monotypes.

Of the two brands, I am more interested in the Gamblin, at least initially, because the oil-based inks are closer to what I know, and according to the company's website, they can be used together with Gamblin oil paints. Still, I don't really understand why I should use ink. Always helpful, the folks at Gamblin provide a nice introduction to Monotype: the painterly print on their website, in which they recommend the use of their "relief inks" and "burnt plate oil" for monotypes rather than oil paints and linseed oil. But Gamblin also makes "etching inks" and I am not sure what the difference is. Also, the relief inks arrived in cans, but are shown in jars on the website; there, etching inks are shown in cans.

I was confused enough that I wrote to Gamblin asking about all this, and received a lovely reply from Joy Mallari, Gamblin's Printmaking Product Manager. In addition to reassuring me that the relief inks had only recently been changed from jars to cans, she explained,

For monotypes ink works better than oil paint because of the physical properties in the different oils used to make ink and paint. Paint is made from linseed oil. Ink is made from burnt plate oil, basically cooked linseed oil. During this “cooking process” fatty acids are eliminated from the oil vehicle. These acids which are still present in oil paint eat through paper and turn it yellow within a year.

A second inquiry of mine about the viability of paints (did I need to throw out those prints I had made?) brought the following:

I would definitely suggest not throwing those out, as the acidity content can be taken down with the addition of burnt plate oil #000. Unfortunately, there will still be some acidic properties that will yellow the paper over time. However the benefit is that you can still work with some of the vibrant oil colors offered in our oil paint line that aren’t available as inks. Sacrifice vs compromise, for sure.

So I am feeling reassured and a bit more knowledgeable, and willing to dip into the relief inks to see what happens.

a lot about paper

The collection of sample printmaking papers from Daniel Smith contains some 32 sheets in a variety of weights and colors, ranging from 175 gm to 360 gm in weight, and whites through beiges to blacks. This particular selection of papers was based on what was available at Daniel Smith at the time of my order. The variety of paper appropriate for printmaking is clearly much greater than I thought. I won't know what I like until I try at least these samples, if not others as well. But I would like to understand the important variables so that eventually I can make knowledgeable choices. I have a sense, for example, that the 175 gm and 360 gm weights are too thin and too thick, respectively.

One of the best non-technical overviews I have found on the Internet is Papers for printmaking at the ARTTalk website. On a somewhat more detailed level, the Wikipedia article on paper, as well as articles on cotton paper and sizing, provided most of the following, though I've paraphrased and summarized.

Paper is produced by pressing together moist fibers, usually cellulose pulp from wood, grasses, or rags, and then drying them into sheet form. The process is thought to have developed in China during the early 2d century AD, though archaeological fragments of paper have been found in that region that date back to the 2d century BCE. China and the U.S. are the leading producers of paper today. Most of the printmaking paper I've seen is called "cotton rag", or "rag paper". Cotton paper is stronger and more durable than paper made from wood pulp, which can also be acidic. From the Dick Blick website:

The distinguishing feature of a good printmaking paper is its ability to take a soaking, to absorb a lot of ink, often with multiple runs through a press, without disintegrating or deforming. Fine printmaking papers are made with an archival fiber source, which in the European printmaking tradition is usually cotton. Japanese papers are often made with kozo (mulberry bark), another durable and archival fiber.

To express thickness, paper is gauged by weight. The U.S. uses a system expressed in pounds, derived from the weight of a ream (500 sheets) of a particular paper cut to a particular, undefined size. Photocopy paper, for example, is somewhere around 24 lbs in weight (obviously not the weight of a single sheet, nor even of a ream of 8-1/2"x11"!). But in the printmaking world, paper is weighed according to the International Standard for paper sizing (ISO 216) used most everywhere else in the world. This weight is in "grams per square meter", expressed as g/m2, gm, or just g, and thus ties a specific weight to a specific size. That 24-lb photocopy paper is 90 g/m2. Paper for normal printing is generally between 60 gm and 120 gm. As indicated above, printmaking paper is much thicker.

In order to regulate how absorbent a paper is, sizing chemicals are usually added during the papermaking process to protect or glaze the fibers and force ink or paint to coat their surface rather than penetrate. Starch and gelatin are two examples of sizing substances. (Paper sizing has nothing to do with the physical dimensions of the paper; the term comes from Old Italian sisa, a glue used by painters to prime canvas or paper.) Paper that contains no sizing is called "water-leaf". Blotting paper is water-leaf, which is why it is so absorbent. Almost all other paper in sized internally during the manufacture process, and high-grade bond and writing papers may also be sized with a surface film that makes them very smooth and somewhat water-resistant. The amount and type of sizing used affect the archival quality of the paper.

Printmaking paper needs to have some absorbency, so it can't be  highly sized. The convention, in fact, is to soak the paper for some period of time (I've seen recommended anywhere from 20 minutes to 24 hours), to loosen up the sizing and allow the paper to absorb more detail from the plate.

For now, this seems to satisfy my curiosity.

Crown Point Press

Perhaps it is my West Coast orientation, but Crown Point Press in San Francisco has captured my attention as an important player in the modern printmaking world. It helps that both Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud, two of the gods in my personal art pantheon, worked and published there. It also helps that Kathan Brown, founder and director, is articulate, outgoing, and good at promoting the field of printmaking and Crown Point's own accomplishments. The company's website provides a history of its development, and it also gives a brief description of its character:

Crown Point Press was founded in 1962 by Kathan Brown in order to use traditional printmaking techniques for new art ideas. Crown Point works with artists by invitation who travel from Europe, Japan and various parts of the United States to work with etching in the San Francisco studios. When artists work in Crown Point's studios they are assisted by master printers and the work results in original prints (sometimes called multiple originals) which are hand-printed in limited editions....

I am new to this whole universe, and as usual my approach includes some background research. In the process of web surfing, Crown Point has popped up repeatedly. One of the first entries that caught my attention was a mention of Richard Diebenkorn doing printmaking there. Over the last few months, I have accumulated four books and six DVDs about monotypes and printmaking; half of each are published by Crown Point. There is not a lot of educational material on the website itself, but it does provide a useful summary of the field of printmaking:

In printing, ink is transferred to paper from another material, usually a metal plate or a wooden block. If the plate or block has been worked so it will receive ink in the same way each time it is applied, then there is a matrix and more than one print can be made.

Before electrostatic, ink jet, and other new ways of printing were invented for use with computers, everything was printed in one of only four ways: relief, intaglio, stencil, and planographic.

The matrix, or ink-holding surface, is different for each one. In relief printing (woodcut) the ink sits on the top surface of a plate or block that has been carved. In intaglio (etching and engraving) the ink sits in the grooves. In stencil printing (silkscreen) there is a hole cut in the matrix and ink is pushed through it. In planographic printing (lithography) the matrix is flat, and the printing part is treated to hold ink, the other parts to repel it.

Crown Point certainly seems to be at the top of the printmaking world, at least in the western U.S. More significantly, on a personal level, its whole history, location, and orientation are very appealing to me. With New Mexico also an apparent center for printmaking, I feel that I am at home in my own region, It is another aspect of the affiliation I feel for this medium.

chine collé

I am intrigued by chine collé, which I mentioned in my post of June 4th, as a way to add texture to my monotypes. I also sense that there may be other reasons to incorporate into my work the thin, fine, beautiful papers that are used for it. They are papers that require support, being too fragile to stand on their own, but they certainly have applications beyond just chine collé. In any case, part of the lure of the monotype world is the chance to learn about, explore, and enjoy paper. I really don't know much about it.

In the most simple chine collé process, a piece of moistened paper with powdered glue sprinkled on its back is laid face-down on top of a painted plate, and this ensemble is inverted onto a piece of damp support paper and run through the press. (At least, this is what I understand so far.) The paper used for this needs to be strong enough to withstand being moistened and manipulated without losing its shape, and must be able to absorb whatever paint or ink is used in the image. I've ordered a jar of rice paste powder, and a sample pack of gampi paper from Hiromi Paper, a major importer of Japanese fine papers. Gampi paper is made from the bark of the gampi bush, found in Japan and the Philippines (and maybe elsewhere). It is very thin, strong, and satiny, and apparently is perfect for chine collé work as it takes ink well. Rice paper is also frequently used for chine collé, and I'm sure there are many other papers and even fabrics that can be used. It all depends on the effects that you want to achieve. The image above is a close-up of a piece of rusted cotton-rag napkin that I incorporated into a print in Helper, and shows how the process can enrich a print's surface.

I've also ordered Magical secrets about chine collé by Brian Shure (2009), another in Crown Point Press's Magical secrets series. The book contains both practical information and instruction, and inspirational examples from dozens of artists. An informative DVD is included; actually seeing some of the processes helps a lot. I've barely skimmed the surface so far, watching and admiring, since I don't yet have the materials I need to try it.

I don't know, yet, what role chine collé will play in my monotype work. But the delicacy of the materials, and of the process, represent an aspect of monotypes (and maybe printmaking in general) that appeals to me. There is a lightness, fragility, and elegance that I perceive dancing at the edges of my imagination, qualities that I'd like to bring into my work. I'm not sure just how this will manifest, nor how I will arrive at that goal, but I am happy to be on the road.