Occasionally somebody would blurt out, “I need to go grind my stone.” “We told you the lithography class was going to be a pain in the ass” one of us responded. Whenever I walked through the lithography end of the print lab, I’d look over at the presses and worktables and see someone scowling and slowly grinding their stone. It didn’t look enjoyable. Eventually though, I’d see a beautiful print they’d completed weeks later, and if I was lucky, I’d get to see them smiling while they peeled the thick paper from their stone. Then they’d get to reprint it and reprint it again.
My friend was a print maker and a ceramicist. Sometimes his lithographic prints defied the thick hard stone they came from because his images were soft and overpowered any kind of limestone I could imagine. Another friend was mostly an intaglio printer. He used found photographic material and created black and white photomontages which he then exposed to light sensitive film, exposed the films onto a photo-sensitive aluminum plate, then etched it in an acid bath. He also drew directly onto the metal plate to scratch-out or add details. Eventually, he used the plate to make black prints onto thick rag paper. They were beautiful and dense. Sometimes they were political, sometimes they were domestic images oozing with melancholy.
I’d often find him sitting on a stool at one of the long wood tables in the central print lab. He was usually humped over his plate, revising it, or manipulating the films he used to expose his plates. His ear buds were usually in and likely listening to Lou Reed or David Bowie. He’d look up and give me a friendly nod if I was just passing through, or I’d sit for a few minutes to talk.
One Saturday evening I was alone in the painting studio on the second floor. During weeknights there were often other students painting, but after midnight, or on a Friday and Saturday night, I was usually alone. I was sitting staring at a blank white canvas. I had just finished applying the last coat of gesso the day before. My friend walked in, greeted me and sat next to me. While we sat there, he scanned a few of my paintings that were around and then settled on the large blank canvas I was about to work on. “I don’t know how you do it.” “Do what?” I said. “How you’re able to stare at a white surface and just start painting without a specific plan”. I asked him why. “Because I’m uncomfortable with the immediacy of it, that’s why I make intaglio prints. I develop a plan and the process takes a long time before the image is printable. It gives me the time to get comfortable with it.” I understood what he meant and explained that I’m usually too impatient.
I’m most comfortable with something I can immediately react to. That’s why I used house paint along with traditional oil paints. House paint allowed me to inexpensively obliterate areas of paintings I didn’t like. That conversation had a huge impact on me. I’d never heard another student reveal themselves in that way about making art, about the reluctance and fear—how the emotional part of the art making process had the biggest impact on what we made and how we made it.
For Ed S. and Dave J.
Songs :: Bottoming Out by Lou Reed, Without You by David Bowie, and the entire Comes a Time and Rust Never Sleeps albums
© C. Davidson
