Ray Maseman

New Image

raymaseman — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 15:33:46 +0000

Still thinking of title….

What Inspires You?

raymaseman — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:42:30 +0000

The image below was the result of me being inspired. I had just read an article about the artist Nancy Spero in Art News, in which she was described as a person who represented her social beliefs in her life and work. I’ve never been sure how to do this as an artist, but something about that article, and Nancy Spero, created a little moment of inspiration. I had just started using giraffes in my work, and they were definitely meant to be artist-figures. I also work as a high school librarian. Much of my job feels like the scene below, where the penguin and seahorse are the students, and the soldiers are the (unfortunately too numerous) adults who seem to often be clueless about the realities of working with teenagers. I end up spending a lot of time mediating between the two.

Defender, 9 x 12" multiple plate etching

What inspires You?

I’m interested in how others respond to this topic as I try to find inspiration for the new pieces I am currently working on.

Making of an Etching, Pt. 3 (Softground)

raymaseman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:06:43 +0000

Normally at this point I’d either be adding an aquatint to the existing etching plate, or creating one of two additional plates to use for color printing. Both of those will yet come in Parts Four and Five, but first I’ve taken a little detour to add a Soft Ground to the plate.

In Part 1 I applied a Hard Ground to the plate and drew an image through it. A Soft Ground performs the same function, but, as the name suggests, it stays soft and pliable. I can still draw in it, but now I can also press textured objects into the ground, leaving a pattern that can be etched.

I want to use the soft ground to create a foliage texture on the tree. First, I select some textured papers and cut them up into bits to make leaf-like shapes.

Next, I arrange the bits of paper on the plate, to get a rough idea of how they might work.

Then I slide the paper bits off to one side and use a Sharpie marker to block out areas that I want to protect from all etching. I don’t do this at all on the lower half of the plate because I am not going to press anything into the soft ground there.

Now the plate needs to be coated with the soft ground. Like the hard ground, the traditional soft ground was made from beeswax and tar, and needed solvents for removal. It has been replaced by water-based relief printing ink, which can be cleaned up with ammonia or, if ammonia is too strong-smelling, soda ash solution.

I’m going to use a brayer to roll the ink onto the plate, just as I would if I were inking up a wood- or linocut for relief printing.

Once the plate is coated, I move it to the press bed and lay the textured bits of paper on top.

I lay wax paper and several layers of newsprint on top before covering with the press blankets. Then I crank the whole sandwich through the press at the same pressure I would use to print. At the other end I move the blankets back and peel off the wax paper (which usually has a lovely little relief image on it).

Then I peel off the bits of paper and discover a surprisingly pleasing result.

Now I need to set aside the plate and let the soft ground cure overnight. (If I etched it now, too much of the ground would dissolve in the etching tank). The next day I returned to the studio and etched the plate for half an hour. After being removed from the tank and cleaned, the plate looks like this:

I inked up the plate and printed it. This is the result:

Coming up next: Aquatint and then creating color plates.

(But first, I need to journey to Crested Butte, CO, for an art festival)

Making of an Etching, Pt. 2

raymaseman — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 02:03:08 +0000

In Part 1 I began the process of creating an etching by drawing on a coated copper plate. The next step is to etch the plate and then ink it up and pull a proof. (Tragically, this chapter suffers a bit from lower image quality. I had to borrow someone’s not-very-good cellphone camera.)

First the etching. I submerged the plate in a tank of Ferric Chloride. The plate hangs vertically in the tank, supported by a piece of strapping tape.

The ferric is safer then the traditional Nitric Acid. The etching reaction in nitric creates a corrosive gas, requiring extensive ventilation equipment. The ferric reaction produces a solid that drops to the bottom of the tank. Ferric Chloride also affects organic matter (e.g. my skin) differently from Nitric Acid, so less danger from acid burns. Nonetheless, it is not good to drink, and retrieving a dropped plate out of the tank requires protective gloves.

The plate sat in the etchant for a total of 40 minutes. However, 25 minutes in, I pulled out the plate, rinsed off the ferric chloride, and drew some more lines, mostly on the house. These lines will not etch as long, so they will be shallower and print up lighter. The plate then went in for 15 more minutes.

Once the 40 minutes is up, the plate comes out again and the ferric is rinsed off. I then use a sodium carbonate (“soda ash”) solution to remove the acrylic hard ground from the plate. Sodium Carbonate is also known as washing soda. You can buy it at the grocery store to enhance the cleaning power of your laundry soap. Far more wholesome then cleaning off a traditional etching hard ground, which required solvents like lithotine or kerosene.

Now the plate is clean–back to the main studio for printing!

This is the printing set up: a palette with a serving of water-based Carbon Black intaglio ink, card for ink application, tarletan for ink wiping, and newsprint for polishing, plus rubbing alcohol for clean-up.

The first step is using a plastic or matboard card to apply the ink to the plate.

Once the entire plate is covered, a tarletan (a piece of heavily starched, cheesecloth-like fabric) is used to wipe of the ink. The ink will mostly wipe off smooth areas, and stay in the etched areas. The etching creates texture on the plate–the more texture, the more ink will stay, and the darker that area will be on the resulting print.

I then give the plate a final polish with a piece of newsprint (usually from a phone book), to remove any remaining ink residue or streaks from the tarletan. The plate then goes off to the press, while I retrieve a piece of paper.

The cotton-rag etching paper needs to be damp for effective printing, so it has been soaking in a water tray while I inked the plate.

I retrieve it, blot off the excess moisture, and lay the damp paper on top of the plate. Felt blankets go on top of this, and the whole sandwich is ready to roll through the press.

Then the moment of truth arrives as I pull the paper off the plate to see the result.

This is the image at this point:

Coming in part three: Soft Ground! (in which the tree receives foilage)

Making of an Etching, Pt 1.

raymaseman — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 04:39:42 +0000

Many people express an interest in the process of creating an etching. Over the next few days I will document this process from almost the beginning to the final trial proof.

We begin already slightly into the process. I’ve cut a piece of copper, bevelled the edges, and coated it with the hard ground–a blue-tinted acrylic coating.

Next, I use a needle tool to begin drawing on the plate. I’m not carving, digging into, or engraving the plate. Just drawing through the acrylic hard ground to expose the metal beneath. The pressure is no more than if I were drawing with an ink pen.

The drawing continues to evolve. I don’t have much of a conceptual “master plan” for this image. It is an incongruous elephant on an incongruous swing on a boat that is floating incongruously high in the water. I’m pretty much just playing. I have been traveling for over a month and this is my first new etching since May.

Here is a close up of one part of the plate. One of the great things about etching is how much detail I can fit into a small area.

I’ve been spending about 1.5 – 2 hours drawing at this point. The image is now ready for the first etch. I’ve been working at home, so the actual etching will have to wait until tomorrow, when I journey to New Grounds.

Check back in tomorrow night for the etching of the plate and the printing of the first print.

What is an Etching?

raymaseman — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:48:15 +0000

Etching is an intaglio printmaking process. It goes back to the 15th/16th century. One of the most famous earlier practitioners was the Dutch artist, Rembrandt. The Rembrandt Museum, in the Netherlands, has a lovely little Flash animation that gives a visual overview of how an etching is made here.

This is basically the same process I use, except that my ground is acrylic, rather than asphalt and wax, because the acrylic does not require toxic solvents, and I use ferric chloride instead of acid (again, because it is safer).

What Is This Piece About?

raymaseman — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 22:44:10 +0000

I get asked this question a lot. Sometimes I’m reluctant to answer it, because part of the fun for me is hearing what others think my work is about. I often hear things I never thought of.

However, there is an answer to this question. Usually, there are two answers. One is the “Official Fine Art” answer. Ideally, this is an articulate, meaningful-sounding answer that combines what I thought I was doing when I started the piece with an after-the-fact analysis of what I was actually doing and what the underlying meanings might be. The other answer is the “pragmatic” one. This is a little of the idea I started with and a lot “I wanted to see what happened if I drew this thing in that place with this other thing” together with by-products of solving composition and design problems.

An Example:

St. Uriel

multiple plate etching, 9" x 6"

Official Fine Art Answer

This is part of Archangels, a series of four multiple plate etchings I completed in 2009. Each piece depicted a traditional archangel, but played around a little with the iconography. They were part of my ongoing attempts at “Non-Religious Religious Art”–art that starts with a a religious topic, but attempts to explore the underlying psychological or archetypal dimensions, rather than taking either a dogmatic approach or an anti-religion one. St. Uriel has attracted the most interest. The other three are St. Michael, St. Gabriel, and St. Raphael.

Uriel is also the most obscure of the four. I think I originally knew about these four archangels as a quartet from reading Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels when I was a teenager. In that context, Uriel was associated with earth, with the direction of South, and with Death. When I created this image, I had a hard time finding much about Uriel. Looking now, it seems that more information has made it online. At the time, all I was really after was earth and an association with death in the sense of decomposition–old things needing to die and wither away so new things would be able to grow.

The Pragmatic Answer

I like drawing outhouses. An outhouse made sense for the Uriel image, because of the decomposition/re-birth theme.

For some time, I had wanted to make a print with an elephant in it. This was a problematic intention, as there are lots of associations with elephants I wasn’t interested in. I wanted I radically different sort of elephant.

When I drew the cave under the outhouse, I realized I had the place to put my radically different sort of elephant. Hallelujah!

After I drew the elephant, I realized he needed something on his back. The nest with eggs made sense as new life. Three is just a good number of objects to have.

That’s it. Anything else is added by you, the viewer. The eggs are not my three children. Any political associations you may choose to read into the elephant are entirely about you, not any intent on my part.