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Sepia Mylar Prints | Digital Prints | Photographic Influence
I draw almost exclusively on mylar, an architectural drafting film. Hardly anyone actually draws on it any more since the advent of computers, but it is still the first choice for plotting drawings of record. The surface has a beautiful tooth, takes multiple erasures, and comes in huge sizes.
The drawings are done in #2 pencil. Frequently, however, I draw for the effect that occurs when they are turned into prints. The 'original' then becomes more like a negative is to a photographer, a sort of 'first state'. Sometimes people like one better, sometimes the other.
The sepia print is also on mylar. Treated so that it is photosensitive, the printing mylar is run through a machine in contact with the original. There, it is exposed to a strong light source. The positive emulsion on the print mylar converts to an image. The streaks and background are part of the process, to be considered like the streaks and slubs in woven raw silk. Although other technologies have overtaken this one, making it somewhat antique like photogravure, sepia prints on mylar (and before that, paper) were the choice of architects and engineers for permanent drawings for about 100 years. Like all art, it will fade if left in too much sun, but the companies that produce the sepia mylar consider this printing method to be archival.
Mylar is almost indestructible—in other contexts it is used to make high altitude balloons and parts of space ships, and has great tensile strength. It is dimensionally stable—meaning that it doesn't expand or contract with heat or moisture. You could throw a cup of coffee or a wad of butter at one of my prints, wash it off with soap and water, and it would look exactly as it did before. It does have a weakness—if it buckles or folds around a point in itself, a pockmark or crease will result that will not go away. It will flatten, but a whiter sort of hiccup will remain where the incident occurred. A print can be dry mounted, which provides the protection of rigidity, and I sometimes varnish them as well. Framing with glass is another option—but this is like covering a painting with glass (which does work sometimes), so one must chose either protection, or immediacy and sensation.
I like to think that the sepia printing, with its luminous richness and texture pointing to antiquity, and the mylar, which is ultra-modern, somehow happily merge the Renaissance and the Jetsons.
With the help of many experts, a few charlatans, and some lovely investors, I have finally made the jump to printing my work in digital media. Like the sepia prints, the basis for digital prints is a black and white mylar drawing in #2 pencil. I am currently producing a folio of four images in editions of 20 each. Three of the images are new and have not been printed before. The print edition of the first image, "Dead Sunflowers," is complete and is spectacular at 50" x 40", about 1/5 again as large as drawn.
These digital pieces are printed on fine archival 100% rag papers in a range of mineral and earth tones as well as the chemical blues of cyanotype. Their surface is rich and velvety, and the image clarity a marvel. Printed in archival pigment-based inks, they represent the leading edge of digital technologies. I am fortunate to have a wonderful printer— Charles River Editions in Waltham. Their energy and devotion to good work is a real pleasure to have on one's side.
The technical information is as follows: Images are scanned one-to-one scale from the mylar original on a Cruse scanner by Laumont Editions in NYC. Charles River Editions (CRE), a branch of the Center for Digital Imaging Arts in Waltham, MA, collaborated with me on corrections and tonal values, and production work was done on an Apple G4/G5 workstation. CRE prints on Epson 9600 (seven-color) large format inkjet printers using UltraChrome™ pigment-based inks because, combined, these offer the highest image quality and the greatest longevity. CRE has special expertise in color calibration, so work is configured with Best Technology Raster Image Processors (RIP) software, and is researched, measured, and calibrated using GretagMacbeth ProfileMaker Pro software. My prints benefited from RIP curves designed by John Woolf of the Museum of Fine Arts, an expert in monochromatic imaging with wide tonal range. The prints were produced on Royal Renaissance (Photo Rag) 309 gsm paper.
Sepia, with its classical intonations, has sustained me for years, but I revel in the new availability of the whole spectrum for my prints. In particular, I love blue—it is primordial and endless, the color of heaven, Tantric blue merging into midnight, chalk blue smeared on a sidewalk, blue Caribbean starfish, the astoundingly blue Med of the coves and anchorages southeast of Marmaris, blue calcite and lustrous clinoclase crystals in the Harvard Museum of Natural History, wooden chairs painted bright blue in a Greek taverna, a cheap brilliant blue Chinese silk scarf on a dull March Cambridge day, the “Blue Moment” of winter sunset in Finland… I used to use blueprints to "proof" a drawing before committing to the expense of printing it in sepia. But blueprints are highly evanescent, as they are done on a cheap acidic paper appropriate for their original use as transitory documents. Light makes them fade quickly, and in a month they will seem duller and begin to yellow. Nonetheless, some well-known artists sell blueprints for thousands, with the spin that the evanescence is part of the experience of the piece of art. Good for them… some of you may remember Yves Klein, another blue aficionado, selling chunks of air. I am glad to finally make blue art that will last.
"He who is willing to work gives birth to his father." --Kierkegaard
I was eight when I began to assist my father on architectural photographic field trips. He fiddled with the knobs on his 8x10 view camera and railed at me about composition, the nature of light, and the general baseness of the human race while I fidgeted, awaiting the order to, say, shift a chair caster 30 degrees to the left.
The beautiful nuances of tonality expanded in the magic of his darkroom, where I learned to manipulate contrast and saturation, and wed visual subtlety with simplicity. My father would often print a negative many times to achieve a 'balance' he could live with. By then I was already drawing avidly, but the influence of his endless demands on himself and on me eventually caused me to stop.
Twenty years later, in 1990, I began again, and revisited photography as a source. My love of tonality and atmosphere reflected back at me from the work of Coburn and Kuhn. To paraphrase Harold Bloom, author of The Anxiety of Influence, what I once was open to I now held myself open to and engaged in. Wowed by Atget's directness and Jekyll's dramatic use of blacks, I copied. My best results came by employing my original drawing as a "negative" in the production of prints.
Stieglitz, Steichen, and yes, my father's work, continue to absorb me. They portray a kind of space with more than depth and perspective, a space with successive planes through which one travels, that surrounds the viewer, into which one falls. Roland Barthes says, "…photographs…must be habitable, not visitable". Likewise, drawing.
Imitation is discontinuity. Repetition makes creativity possible. I answer the call of my forebears' aspirations.