December 21, 2009
never put a REAL kitty in an acid bath
The etching gets a bath! A zinc plate covered in brown grounding substance, scratched away with a little stylus.
It’s amazing that this wee bamboo brush survives a dunking in the nitric acid bath, but the zinc plate gets eaten up like a corncob on the fourth of July.
Watching the acid work was fantastic.
I’m enjoying stumbling through the essentials of etching in John Greco’s workshop at Josephine Press in Santa Monica. After four soul-grinding hours of exhausting, brain-tangling, stupendously meticulous protomanual labor, I completed a simplistic portrait of my cat Spydre.
She had graciously posed for a series of sketches and then was waiting at the door to inspect the first two in the series. A flock of etchings quite literally hot off the press. Still damp, and squashed, and just between us, I think the paper was a bit surprised to find this ink imbedded in it.
When you think about it, an etching is little more than tattooing paper. The application methods differ (I’m glad we don’t yet endure some barbaric tattoo method where we’re dunked in acid, our skin eaten away, and then pressed to get the wrinkles out…oh wait, hm, we do). But the ink is in there to stay.
The day after my printmaking marathon, I wore my sweater backwards the entire day. I felt mildly constricted and a bit disoriented – a mystery that only resolved itself when I finally removed the garment before sleeping. Twelve hours laboring in ignorance – well, I’ve logged far more in less enlightened pursuits. Still, it was nice to be able to breathe and move my arms. I blame printmaking. It took so long to train the brain to work in reverse, and then – for once – it complied by not switching everything back to its familiar habits. I wonder what else I reversed that day.