Fourteen test strips taped to the wall and I can't tell which one is the print
I've spent the last four days pulling test strips of the same plate. Same zinc, same ink, same paper, and then small deviations: pressure, dampness of the paper, how long I leave it in the ferric. Fourteen of them now, taped in a row above the press.
The problem is that number nine and number twelve are better prints than the edition will be. And they are not the edition. They are the accidents of a Tuesday. If I try to chase number nine I will spend a week failing to make it again, and if I don't chase it I have to accept that the thing I like most in my own work is a thing I cannot repeat.
This is supposed to be the whole argument of my practice, the multiple, the democratic copy, the print as something that exists in many. And here I am in the studio romanticising the one sheet that got away. I feel like a fraud about twice a day.
I know some of you will say: keep the strip, show the strip, that is the work now. Which is a clean solution and I do not trust it. It feels like when you cannot finish something so you frame the sketchbook page.
Anyway. Number nine stays on the wall until I decide. Possibly it stays there forever. The wall is getting crowded and I have started to avoid looking at it when I walk past, which is probably my answer.
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Mm, this one sits with me. I don't do plates, but I know the accident. You get a block of fabric pieced just so because the light was low and your hands were tired and you weren't watching as close as you should, and it's the best thing on the wall. Try to make it again on purpose and it goes stiff on you every time.
I don't think the answer is chasing nine or writing it off either. Nine already told you something your hands know and your head hasn't caught up to yet. Keep it up on that wall. Don't try to copy it, just look at it and ask what it's doing that the edition isn't. Might be you can't get that exact print back, but you can carry the lesson of it into the next plate and let it come out different. The Lord gives the good ones on the days we ain't gripping so tight.
The tired hands part is the honest bit. I've had it with wax, a scrape that went too far and left a passage I could never find again because I was not aiming at anything. Naja. What I would add is that "what is it doing that the edition isn't" is usually a smaller thing than it feels like. Not the whole print. One pressure relationship, the way the ink sat. If you can name it that precisely you can sometimes build it back into the process on purpose, just not by copying the strip.
The wax scrape is a good one to bring in, because there the hand really did go first and the eye followed after. And you're right that naming it small is the whole trick. When I said "number nine is better" I was describing a feeling, not a variable, and feelings cannot be put on the press again.
So, in the spirit of taking my own advice: the thing in nine is the ink sitting slightly proud on the damp paper, a soft edge on the dark that is not quite wiped clean. Which is not a mystery, it is a dampness and a wiping pressure I can measure. The hard part is admitting that once I measure it, it becomes a decision, and some of the charm goes. The accident stops being an accident the moment it has a name.
Which maybe is the real answer to my own question. The edition is the thing you can say out loud. The strip is the thing you can only point at.
"Your hands know and your head hasn't caught up" is the sentence I'm going to be thinking about all week, thank you for that. And the bit about the low light and tired hands, that's the part I keep circling. Number nine happened because I stopped being careful, which is a hard thing to build into a process that is essentially a process of being careful.
I think you are right that copying it is the wrong move. What I've started doing instead is pulling the edition properly, badly, honestly, and keeping nine on the wall next to it like a note to myself. Not a target. More like evidence that the plate can do something I haven't found a way to ask for yet.
Fabric is different though, you can't really re-set the block. Does the good accident ever come back on its own, or is it always a new one?