POST #152: THE PRESSLESS PRINT

The summer before I got married, I took a course in woodblock printing at Pratt Graphic Center in Manhattan. The class was taught by a print maker I greatly admired, Antonio Frasconi. He and I had similar ‘sensibilities,’ favoring expressiveness over abstraction and during the two months I was in his class I produced several fairly successful small woodblocks. The problem for me with woodcuts was that carving large-sized blocks required physical strength I simply did not have. When I did go back to printmaking a decade or so later after my children were born, I worked with something called Battleship Linoleum, easier to handle on a large scale. I have no idea where it got its name; maybe one of my readers can tell me. It came in three-foot rolls that I cut into blocks, the size of my kitchen table. Even better, I discovered that if I ran my electric iron on Low over the surface while I worked, the material softened to a butter-like consistency that allowed me to carve large, expressive prints with a minimum of physical effort.  Since I didn’t have a press, I learned how to print

Japanese style, inking the block with a rubber brayer and then pressing a wood spoon or a baren over the paper to transfer the ink. It was a ‘hit or miss’ proposition but somehow it worked most of the time. Over a few years, I created a half dozen prints I was really proud of and then, without warning, the magic was gone. Nothing worked. No matter how much I warmed the block, cutting became a struggle and the blocks looked clumsy and lacked “flow.” After several failed attempts, I gave up printmaking and went back to painting where at least I could control my material. It wasn’t until years later when I told a fellow printmaker my story that I learned that the problem was in the material, not my skill. According to him, there was an ingredient in the original linoleum called Kaori gum came from an ‘endangered’ specie of tree and was no longer available. How could I have known?

Around two years ago, I finally went back to printmaking, only this time on the computer. I accidentally discovered that if I printed photos of my collages or drawings onto sheets of overhead projector acetate and mounted them on toned paper, they looked like etchings or engravings. Once you matted and framed them, they appeared to be “the real thing.” My friend Priscilla who taught printmaking at SUNY Purchase for twenty years, told me I had invented a new printing  technique. I’m now frantically producing prints, putting them in mats and thrift shop frames and giving them to friends. My big fear is not that someone will copy my technique, but that my printer will break down and the new model will no longer get the same results. Happens to me all the time. Technology giveth and technology taketh away.   

Happy New Year    

Renee Kahn