Author: Sasha

2020 CROWN POINT PRESS: SUMMER ETCHING WORKSHOP APPLICATION

We don’t ask to see examples of your art as part of your application because, on principle, we don’t make judgments about the art of our workshop participants, either before or during the workshops.

For all new and returning applicants, please send an email to Sasha Baguskas (workshops@crownpoint.com) with the following information:

Your name, address, phone number, email.

Which workshop session(s) you would like to participate in, with alternates if possible. Please make clear your order of preference for the dates.

Week 1:    June 15 – June 19
Week 2:    June 22 – June 26
Week 3:    July 6 – July 10
Week 4:    July 13 – July 17

Have you taken our workshops before?

Please tell us a little bit about yourself—are you an artist, printer, photographer, student, teacher, curator, or interested layperson in the print world? Have you worked with printmaking before? What medium? How extensively? Please make this brief.

We will accept applications through February 10 or until the workshop is full. We will try to confirm your participation during the week of February 17, 2019. We will not accept applications via phone. Payment is due in full within 48 hours of acceptance. We will send out an email invoice as confirmation of your participation.

CANCELLATION POLICY: The fee for the week-long workshop is $1800 not including the costs of paper and copper; this is tallied and billed to you at the end of the workshop based on use. If you cancel before May 1, we will refund half the workshop fee ($900); there is no refund after that date.

We look forward to seeing you this summer!

A scraper is a wedge-shaped tool with a knife blade at each edge that is used to scrape away metal, usually to remove marks incised in the plate. The scraper leaves marks of its own that must then be burnished and polished if the formerly marked plate area is to be made smooth enough not to hold ink.

A burnisher is  bent, rounded tool, not a blade, for making changes in a metal plate after it has been incised. The burnisher, used with oil, smooths out marks after they have been diminished by scraping the metal with a scraper.

Julie Mehretu‘s print, Unclosed, from her 2007 project at Crown Point press, has an allover pattern of fine radiating lines in shifting color that changes across the print. How was this aspect of the print achieved?

Mehretu created the radiating lines in hard ground etching, which is where the artist draws with a point through a hard wax coating and exposes the copper. The marks will etch when the plate is put in acid. Mehretu wanted the lines to have a certain kind of color. “The idea was to create a modulation of four colors that blend to create a multitude of colors on one plate,” Brooks said. She explained that this practice is called “à la poupée,” which means printing many colors from a single plate.

Catherine Brooks, the project’s lead printer,  created a map to locate the colors Mehretu imagined within the starburst pattern on one plate.

The map marks off the initial placement of the inks.

The printers apply the ink to the plate according to the map.

This video shows how the colors are blended with tarlatan, and then hand wiped. Watch the glancing motion of the hand as the plate is being wiped. When wiping a hard ground line it’s important to wipe perpendicular to the line, so you don’t wipe the ink out of the line.

You can see the color hard ground plate being printed first. See how the blue radiating lines stare out at you under the marks printed from second plate.

Mehretu’s process is (and metaphorically refers to) layering and excavation, building and obliteration. The way she works in etching provides a unique window on her thinking, as well as an image that could not come about any other way.