Intaglio Printmaking

This course has two essential goals: to introduce you to the fundamental techniques of intaglio printmaking, and to develop your ability to express yourself in the visual arts. These goals are utterly interdependent, even symbiotic. While it is clear that there is no singular or universal method for the development of one's artistic voice, it is equally clear that good work results from the interplay between having something to say and manipulating material form. What this really means is that you have something very exciting to do. You must simultaneously immerse yourself in every detail of technique while exploring the most extreme heights and depths of your imagination, and somehow you must marry the two.

Expression is infinite. History may suggest a limited number of narratives (like the limited number of kinds of song: love song, rebellion/war song, carousing song) but the nuances of the telling of each specific version creates an inexhaustable texture of experiences. For this course, the most important attitude for you to have towards expression is one of questioning. From the technical point of view, you must be an empiricist. This requires intense discipline. You will learn traditional intaglio techniques such as drypoint, line etching, aquatint, soft-ground, and lift-ground, as well as monotype. To process and then harness so much information demands that you be highly organized, that you anticipate problems, and that you develop and test hypotheses- that you ask questions. Your intuition will be your other greatest asset, and will help you give form to your questions about how to ask your questions, what the right questions are, and how to say what you want to say.

This is an upper level course, and it is going to be intense. You must constantly be drawing and developing new ideas for prints. A sophisticated understanding of drawing issues is quintessential. I expect you to keep a sketch-book (though I expect you to draw and not sketch), and I expect you to go to every Tuesday night model session in addition to doing resolved drawings of the landscape and still-life. Drawing is going to be about half of the work for this class. Engaging the technical challenges of printmaking with a good drawing in hand will dramatically increase the quality of your prints. Intaglio is extremely time consuming, and can be heartbreakingly frustrating. Therefore, we will have occassional extra class sessions on Friday afternoons to work on technical problems. You should only take this course if you are not just prepared for the work, but excitied by the prospect of pushing so deeply into making art.

There will be approximately one print due per week, though this will ebb and flow with the introduction of new techniques and with periods of working. We will have a crit every two weeks or so that will cover two techniques. I will grade each of your prints and encourage you to do revisions. There will not be mid-term and final projects, per se, but there will be a final critique on Tuesday, December 11th, from8:30-11:30 a.m. Part of your standing in the class will be determined by the ammount and quality of your drawings, and also by the ammount and quality of your journal entries and technical data which we will share with one another on a bulletin board on-line. Part of making this class successful will be discussing contemporary ideas in art making and in printmaking in order to create a context for your work in the studio. Another part will be trying to see as much good art as possible, and so there will be a trip to the Johnson Museum in Ithaca, a lecture by the painter Elizabeth Murray in Rochester, a visit to the Rochester Print Fair, and possibly a trip to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo. We will also have at least one guest demo/lecture by printmakers in the area.

So, start drawing!