Hi everyone, First there was that burst of intros, now there's the discussion on printmaking. With the recent Internet worm knocking two days off my schedule -- I'm a sysadmin and web designer and yes I use vi -- I haven't had a lot of spare writing time but I should pop in now while the context is right...
I'm Eric Theise, 42, originally from Chicago, have lived in San Francisco for twelve years. Up until recently, I've always let making art slide in favor of making a living and having some sort of career. But I've taken pictures since I was in grade school, and did some 16mm film work in the 80s. Last summer I took an etching workshop at Crown Point Press, and got very fired up about the whole thing. I joined what is basically a printmakers co-op in Berkeley called Kala, and this summer I took the photogravure workshop at Crown Point. In preparation for that, I built a 4 x 5 pinhole camera out of pine and a grafmatic back, and have by now finished editioning five photogravures, and am getting ready to shoot and print some more. The work is interesting, I think -- I will eventually get some up on the web -- but it puts me in a funny position because I presently think of myself as a printmaker who's used photographic means to get an image onto a copper plate. But everyone who sees the work thinks I'm a fine art photographer. Well, okay. In short, photogravure is a mid-1800s technique, possibly the first successful technique for printing photographic images. It involves contact printing a full sized positive onto a sensitized gelatin sheet, affixing the gelatin to a copper plate which is dusted in rosin -- aquatinted -- and etching through the gelatin into the copper via a series of acid baths. The plate is printed with etching ink and a press like any intaglio method. Even though photogravure was supplanted by rotogravure by the early 1900s, it was used by Alfred Stieglitz for most of the pieces in Camera Work, by Edward Curtis for his famous series of North American Indians, and by Paul Strand for his Mexican series. It is a fairly complex and error-fraught process. So that's what I do, and why I'm here. Seems like we may have a quorum for a Bay Area pinhole group, and I will certainly invite any Bay Area people out to the Headlands Center for the Arts for the Fall Open House, Sunday October 14th from noon to 5pm, where I'll be showing this work, the camera, and some other prints. Three buildings full of art and artists; I'm in the basement of Building 960 overlooking the Historic Nike Missile Site (for real). More later. Best, Eric
