For centuries, maybe longer, printmaking has been a painstaking art.
The stone lithograph, for example, begins with “graining” a heavy piece of Bavarian limestone, a half-day process in which the printmaker applies ever-finer abrasives to create a smooth pallet for the image.
Then comes the image itself, carefully created with materials containing Carnuba wax, lamp black and soap.
Then the stone is dusted with rosin and talc and chemically processed with a solution of gum arabic and nitric acid. The stone requires two of these “etches” with an overnight resting time between the first and the second etch.
Then comes the ink and water. (Fundamental to printmaking is that grease and water repel; the oil-based ink sticks only to the grease.)
Finally the piece goes to press. And if the printer plans to use multiple inks, the process is repeated for each one.
All along the way, of course, an inadvertent fingerprint, the wrong humidity, a slight slip can wipe out days of work and send the printmaker back to the beginning.
“It's no wonder that printmakers can get frustrated,” said Sandy Wimer, artist in residence, whose show “A Passion for Printmaking” opens Jan. 25 in the Nott Memorial's Mandeville Gallery.
A revolution
Despite all the labor – and frustration – the process of printmaking by hand inspires the creative process, Wimer says. “There is a Zen quality when you're graining the stone, a sort of rhythm you get thinking about the image you are going to create.”
But the days of labor-intensive printmaking may be numbered. Enter the color desktop printer, which for only a few hundred dollars can produce images that rival those produced on hand presses costing $15,000 or more.
“It is a revolution,” Wimer says, “but I don't want to say that too loudly.”
But is this revolution really printmaking?
“Printmaking is all about ideas,” says Wimer. “The computer is like a pencil, an easel, another tool … that's all it is. How you put ideas together is what is most important.”
Wimer emphasizes the importance of students learning the fundamentals of printmaking by hand: “People may challenge me on this, but I think you've got to go through all the practical aspects of printmaking to appreciate the art.”
The formula
“I wished I could just let it go, but it kept tapping me on the shoulder,” Wimer says.
“It” was a formula for photolithography (making prints by exposing photographic images directly to the printing plate). Wimer's mentor, Thom O'Connor, a renowned printmaker and professor emeritus at the University at Albany, had seen the process only twice in his career and urged Wimer to give it a try. His urging launched Wimer on a research odyssey.
The formula called for Ivory Snow flakes. After some fruitless trials, Wimer began to suspect that the soap formula had been changed, a suspicion she confirmed with a call to Proctor and Gamble. So, she found success by putting Ivory bar soap and water through a food processor. Later, she read about a “Marseilles Soap” from France that had been used in 19th-century printmaking. She searched the Internet and found it. Still, the results were not consistent.
The eeriest coincidence took place on a visit to the Smithsonian at a time when Wimer had grown frustrated and decided to forget about the formula for a while. Her nephew, looking at a photolithograph, asked, “Sandy, is this the kind of print your students make?” It was then that Wimer discovered the formula was patented in 1858 by a Boston printmaker and lithographer. When she got home, she looked up the patent, the exact formula her mentor had given her, unchanged after a century and a half.
“I have never experienced anything like this before,” she says. “I am just a person who makes pictures, not a person who does research. To this day, I have not really perfected it,” she adds.
“Sometimes it works. Most of the time, it's not quite right. And I am haunted by it.”
Wimer's “crazy experience” with the formula inspired a series of photolithographs and computer-generated prints that combine images of clouds overlaid with text from the 1858 patent. She calls the series “Out of the Blue.”
The sky
Many of Wimer's prints emphasize the sky, not surprising in that she grew up in Oklahoma where, she says, “the horizon is very low.
“The Gulf Stream produced some very cinematic skies,” she recalls. “The sky seems clearer and deeper, and you grow up always looking at the sky.
“Now in the Northeast, the light is muted and more angular, and the topography narrows the field of vision of the sky,” she says. “I pine away for that sky.”