It’s been a weird year, and a facet of the weirdness has been very little work independently released here on AP. I have been busy but with all sorts of weird stuff that in hindsight is mostly just distractions. Often necessary or good but distractions nonetheless. 

It is important to know why you do things, reasons,  I mean for the most part antiquated press is all about creating work that lacks the obvious reason and purpose which comes along with projects and jobs and the like. It is about compulsions and hands-never-being-idle, and working in the medium of intaglio printmaking methodically and consistently till always. But then reasons happen. less intrinsic fun projects and endeavors. Not sure what i am saying, except that 2017 was weird. It did bring a lovely show for Antiquated Press, and the massive undertaking of “Whale” and a number of AP things that won’t fully be realized till next year and years to come.

2018 will be more productive, of that I am certain.

I do have a new print, just posted it. And It is also part of a wonderful gallery show 100X100 (all about affordable accessible independently created contemporary art) at the IGCA

. It is “Moon” a 14X14 etching. All done in aquatint. It is an edition of 60 and sales go to support the International Gallery of Contemporary Art. The very same gallery that hosted my show. It is a gallery I have grown quite fond of over the years.

For this print i chopped up the copper into 60 equal pieces, I numbered each and with every print buyers get a piece of the copper. Pretty cool interactive edition thing..

 anyhow here are some photos of the process and the final etching.

The whole of the etching was done in aquatint using step biting. I liked working in the negative, but i absolutely missed making lines. I am most comfortable making marks. 

I got a nice deep velvety aquatint. Very pleased with my blacks

The plate all freshly etched and clean from removing all the layers of stop out

Inked up very toothy

After proofing and then pulling the full edition. I etched the back of the plate with the edition numbers

I chopped the plate up, and rounded the edges and drilled a hole (so it can hang on a nail) 

Since this will be in a show and has the added facet of the copper pieces i built a cabinet/frame. I have been working on a number of wood projects lately so it was fun and familiar. I used some scrap mahogany (beautiful stuff to work with) 

sixty prints, sixty tags, sixty nails, glad I didn’t do 100 :) 

letterpress backers 

cabinet all hung in the gallery 

Pretty pleased with the interactive nature of this as a gallery piece. 

So yeah, thanks for reading all this. 

Your Pal Joe