Etching Artist's Diary
The artist provides the vision and imagery of the living print, laboring after the compelling image.
"From a purely descriptive point of view--let us say, from The Isle we're on today--we're drinking from what was originally only one of innumerable branches forming the taxonomic and psychic ramifications of our lives."
I watched B.O.S.S.' screen rather jerkily filling with the Frenchman's pontification.
"But because this particular stream, alone among the others, has succeeded--thanks to a privileged structure and intellect, it merged with instinct and thought. It then was able to spread out in this Great Lake, this completely free zone on Earth so as to form a spectrum of another order--Emeralda--a world of immense anthropological and immortal types known as us."
I wanted to stop him and suggest that he enumerate the streams; then I thought better of it. I'd keep the number to myself. He was continuing on, and Susan, I mean B.O.S.S. (I miss her!) was keeping all her translators busy.
"Let us take a glance at this first fanning out . . .." Then he paused.
First? I thought it was the eighth. Oh, for my chart. I stuck to my needling. This was our first lunch together, after all. I did not interrupt him.
Diehard continued: "In virtue of the particular form of quantum cosmogenesis adopted here, the problem our task entails for our art and craft is plainly the following: Under what form does the human layer still obey (or which is it exempt from) the forces of quantum cosmology evolution that gave it birth?"
There was silence. I was tapping on my plate with a end of a chopstick I'd dipped in ground, dripping ground on my needling mistakes. Diehard was gone. I knew the translation I had captured was probably slightly off his meaning, but it would do. "That'll do, B.O.S.S.," I entered.
"Before we can understand the current world,' she was saying, "and indeed before we can gain a perspective on Emeralda--on things to come--we need to understand the preface to History." She smiled, and I thought I caught her glance at me, knowingly. She resumed her serious tone. "We must look at ourselves and our culture on the grand scale of a long, long time-scale." I realized then she had pronounced the word history as "his-story." "I quote Tudge: beneath the surface tremors," and here she paused and looked up from her notes directly at me--this time I was not imagining it. Harmonic tremors. Purpose tremors. So much she had taught me!
". . . of our lives," she went on, "there are much deeper and more powerful forces at work that, in the end affect us all and all out fellow creatures." She looked up and added, "and creators. And all living things--all carbon-based life." There was a stir in the room. "For human desires are ultimately adaptive responses shaped by your--by man's--biological nature." Her eyes had taken on a look of steely sadness. "Physically you--we--are very similar to our ancestors of thirty thousand years ago. Culturally we have moved far, far away."
"Did you write the positives?" "Oh, no. I forgot." She bent down, removed the glass sheet and told me to get a sheet of paper. I watched, then, as she carefully lifted and pulled at the lower edge of the print.
"Okay," she said, and read the numbers, "9607071X00, 9701221620 and 9702111827. Got them?" "Yes." She then put fresh daubs of paste and re-attached the print. "You're only the artist so I forgive you," she said as she worked. Then she added, "To keep these alive it helps to have the true numbers. They're better than starting all over."
Am I looking at a tree upside down or at its roots? And my roots are in trees and in Living Prints. So many of the words in plate making and printmaking are rich with tactile and visual sensations--like burnishing, scraping and proving.
This is a very physical and sensual art and craft but it is also highly intellectual. More so than its sister arts, drawing, painting and sculpture. More so than the others, it overlaps and penetrates human structural intellectual capital, gets into the histories of the sciences, engineering and mathematics.
I love these Living Prints. They bring pattern into my life. Even forecasts and they help shape things before they are upon me. Last night, for example, we happened to see, on TV, a program about trees--and this just hours before I needle my arborescence on the plate for "Hand". Did Grudin say art is pure energy? How many times this occurred to me as I engraved "Hand"! A struggle--and etching lets the mordant do the struggling. Hardly any energy on my part!
Really! I cut out a shape in the plastic sheet covering the plate, just kind of randomly. Then as I worked, I noticed at certain angles the shape took on a different resemblance. Looking at it one way it looked like a tree. Another way, a cloud. Then I cut a little extra room in one side where the composition seemed a little pinched. Then the tree changed into a pudgy-face in profile.
I was polishing until the plate was like a mirror, and I was looking at this funny face and then something else caught my eye--MY face! I laughed out loud.
| Curator's Log | The curator is seldom seen but is always seeing to it that the Living Prints' records are correct and rules followed. | |
| Printer's Notes | The printer performs many tasks to keep prints alive, crafting and designing solutions to problems the artist, curator and publisher propose. | |
| Publisher's Journal | The publisher produces the bases for living prints by supporting all the players and keeping communications clear and on course. | |
| Professor's Papers | The professor explains the living print, the history of printmaking, and keeps the academic community informed. |
