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- Printmaking, for me, is a direct expression of consciousness and the human condition; as in a feedback loop, the bilateral symmetry of the plate to print reflects our bodies, our imprint. It is a direct method to look at ones self in the mirror; a psychological means to literally face one self while making work. This phenomenon occurs throughout the processes intrinsic to printmaking: in the conceiving, in the making, in the reflecting. I am consistently and continually intrigued by what this process offers emotionally and aesthetically. I may not always see what I want, but the process is revealing and compelling enough to warrant continued and prolonged investigation.
I teach printmaking within a specific model – the Art School in America, year 2005. To accomplish that, I teach within boundaries – a discipline within a discipline. Printmaking is more than one medium: etching, lithography, silkscreen, woodcut, drypoint, and digital; but in my mind, it is one discipline. When I teach, I focus on what these practices have in common and what, in my mind, makes them worth teaching in this day and age.
Here’s a story: One of my students in an intro to etching class was dutifully and begrudgingly completing etching assignments. He hated etching but the course was a requirement. The student came and told me so and although I sympathized, I said, “you have to make etchings and editions to pass this class. I don’t care how. If you don’t, I can’t and won’t pass you.”
Fast forward two weeks: The same student came to class. It was an open workday. The student had melted down all his previous copper plates and cast them into an old fashioned office-type rubber stamp shape. On the flat base of the copper stamp shape is now etched the word “etching,” right-reading. With a big mallet
and a stack of damp paper, the student spent the entire class inking the word “etching” then hammering with one very loud single crack the copper stamp to the paper. It was nerve-wracking for all of us but I wasn’t about to stop the process.
The lesson: I could not make this student love making etchings, but I could recognize and foster the expressed recognition of the skeletal framework at the heart of printmaking.
As I see it, when one etches into a plate and prints it, the resulting marks are just that – the impression of an etching plate printed on paper. The impressions have that visceral, illusionary, vexing, paradoxical and enchanting quality. They feel like what they are –
marks made in time and marks made in an instant. That’s a print – irreducible. It’s not a reverse of the plate – where right is left and left is right, but mirrored, like bilateral symmetry. Because I see print in this way, I can relay to the plate sensations of my specific physicality, my body.
I am the little scribe behind the Etch-a-Sketch glass. When I look at my prints, I see I have been drawing behind the paper. I stand facing myself. I recognize that the person one sees in a mirror points to the right when I point to my left. Looking in a mirror,
you have mentally placed yourself in the mirrored image’s position. You have mentally turned around. You are facing yourself. A print, in fact, is the same. It is not a reversal, but an imprint – no more or less.
In this way, when an experienced etcher works on a plate, etching out metal and manipulating the surface, the etcher is not working in reverse where right is left and left is right, but from the inside out. We, the viewers, as well as the etcher viewing the print on paper are faced with a literal kind of visual palindrome.
When someone asks me “How can you stand teaching when the student might not care?” My response is “it’s ok. I care about being here and so do they. I teach through printmaking, or rather what I think of as the archetype of printmaking, with a capital P. Through the language I know as print, through the discipline I
know as print, comes the world we live in. The same ideas that we find in printmaking resound in areas such as physics, metaphysics, chemistry, psychology, anatomy, linguistics, astronomy, medicine, and poetry. I find it valuable to stay within my discipline, to exhibit the discipline of the discipline, and in this process, students and onlookers may glimpse possibilities and the
connections of an increasingly interdisciplinary world.
The course of Printmaking, the archetype with the capital P, is advanced by whoever takes up the oar. I feel as long as we are here, we may as well all row.
Copyright Shelley Thorstensen 2005
All rights reserved
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