Travels in pictures – part II

Half a year after depart­ing towards Rome, long since hav­ing returned back home, I got my first wee etch­ing press. Starting from scratch, what bet­ter way to learn intaglio print­mak­ing than to pro­cess the pre­vi­ous trip draw­ings? Their tech­nic­al and styl­ist­ic vari­ety was such that I’d have to try the entire spec­trum of etch­ing techniques.

Of the 18 draw­ings, about half have been done. Many required sev­er­al plates till I was con­tent, some of the fol­low­ing still do; some draw­ings don’t war­rant a print at all. Probably three to five are still to fol­low, includ­ing one huge plate at least equal to Pontarlier if not more intric­ate, the print of the Siena pan­or­ama. The rest, roughly in order of print­ing, look thus:

“Bern, Bärenplatz”, cop­per etch­ing, 2016 

Anzio was done on a lar­ger plate and for the first, though sure not the last time, I con­fused the dir­ec­tions – after all, the plate mir­rors the real image and so there remain acci­dent­al traces of the moun­tain that’s sup­posed to be on the left on the right, too. 

My first aquatint nev­er made it to a full edi­tion. The draw­ing’s faults have only been enhanced and so I’ll give this one anoth­er try later. 

Bern in rain, the first and second plate. The first was just to fig­ure out wheth­er the meth­od worked and looks rel­at­ively crude still; the second I found badly drawn with the road open­ing too widely. Moreover the hatch­ing has been done with a steel brush, and its gen­er­al look is just not as nice as with manu­al work. 

Bern in rain, fourth plate (the third was a com­plete fail­ure show­ing only some inform­al splotches of black). To me it’s per­fect. Only the etch­ing was too del­ic­ate, and the plate wore so quickly that I got only a hand­ful of good impres­sions out of it. 

The Besançon plate has a nice gen­er­al look though I did­n’t achieve the ori­gin­al object­ive, of recre­at­ing the draw­ing’s express­ive­ness. Sugarlift aquatint played a great role here. 

The oth­er express­ive draw­ing I tried to adapt with dry­po­int. That also jus­ti­fied the record num­ber of eight states, since the plate is so quick to change. 

While in the ori­gin­al draw­ing I had wanted to super­im­pose interi­or and façade of the same church, miss­ing a façade draw­ing, in the print I went for interi­or + road lay­out of Genova’s centre. 

A rather quick line etch­ing, plainly copied from Ralph Steadman’s frontis­piece to „Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“. 

This motive was­n’t so likely to be prin­ted, had it not been the per­fect prac­tice plate for the large Pontarlier print: Line hatch­ing and aquatint over­layed as Goya would have done it. 

In the Fribourg print, day became night. Failing the ori­gin­al tech­nique I had tried for the sky – a gelat­ine ground that’d allow for gentle gradi­ents if only it had­n’t swum off too fast –, I pol­ished out the moon and its rays, mezzotint-style. 

“Le sac­re des con­tra­ban­diers II”, cop­per etch­ing and aquatint, 2017