Art

Item Description

"I have never thought of myself exclusively as a printmaker but I am increasingly drawn to the printing process. My particular print for the 30/30 project was inspired by a print that I found on my grandfathers workbench after his death. He was amused by the ambiguous space depicted among the three walking figures legs. My grandfather who ran a fruit orchard was a great draftsman, had a bent sense of humor and remains a puzzle to me.

DON'T PANIC…

When I started the print project my area of 'expertise' was to be with ImagOn, a new non-toxic etching process. I had casually worked with two generations of the ImagOn film for about 4 to 5 years patching together tools and equipment in a makeshift manner and I had achieved moderate to good success. When the 30/30 Print Project started I realized that there was a new, third generation of High Definition ImagOn film that had characteristics and processing techniques that I was not familiar with. In fact I could not get the film to respond to any of the processes that I had previously had success with. The inventor of the ImagOn process, Keith Howard had recently published his second book that outlined the differences in the film and all of the new procedural requirements. I purchased the book and started reading only to discover that the film would no longer respond to the photo lamps that I had been using to expose the image and instead required a commercial Plate Burner with a vacuum table and a powerful 1000 W Mercury Vapor lamp.  I found a used plate burner on eBay that was located in Indiana and I purchased it and had it shipped to Vermont.

The plate burner arrived and I began to familiarize myself with the working of the machine. My first problem was to reorient my thinking from darkroom time in seconds and adapt a system for exposing plates relying on time measured in Light Units. 

My next undertaking was to learn how to use an Aquatint Screen. The Aquatint screen is a flexible Mylar sheet composed of thousands of random dots that create continuous, non linear areas of light and dark tones in a print.  

Beyond mastering technical problems the primary source of my knowledge came from the variety of work that the printmakers in my group presented.  Each artist's work was conceived and presented in a unique way and a different solution was necessary for each work."

http://7dvt.com/2010two-tango