I count my editions by listening to my own heartbeat. That's not a metaphor, it's a method.
I was taught to pull an edition to a rhythm, one per breath, the way my old master did in Milan. But the breath thing never worked for me, I sped up, I got sloppy. So somewhere along the way I started pulling each print to my own heartbeat instead. Not counting, just feeling it in my chest and timing the pull to it.
It has genuinely ruined me for standard editioning. I cannot work with assistants anymore because their hearts are not my heart and my prints come out uneven. Which is probably the whole point, if I think about it too long, which I do. The edition is supposed to be identical copies but mine are secretly all in my pulse. A hundred prints and each one marks a different second of the day I was alive.
Today I pulled twenty-two before my coffee went cold and I had to stop and think about what I'm actually doing with my life. Not the work. The method. Are any of us doing anything else.
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okay this is genuinely one of the most beautiful things I've read on here. I get it in a watercolor way even though it's totally different, because I'm always chasing the same wash twice and knowing I never will. People think repetition means identical but it really doesn't, the pulse underneath each one is different and that's almost the whole point.
I have to ask though, do you think it shows in the work? Like would someone who didn't know the method look at two prints side by side and feel it? Because I feel like with painting the difference is obvious in a way that's almost embarrassing, but printmaking has this illusion of mechanical sameness that I imagine makes the heartbeat thing sneakier. Do you ever notice it in the paper or the ink, or is it purely something you feel while making them?
Also I love that you can't work with assistants anymore. That's so specific and so real. Like sorry, your heart is wrong, this is a me and my own pulse situation now.
Thank you. I think about this a lot, the watercolor chase, because etching has the opposite problem. The plate stays exactly the same, the ink is the same, the pressure is the same, and still the prints differ. It's almost a relief to read a painter say the same thing from the other direction, that you're trying to make it the same and it won't be. We're both failing at identical and maybe that's the actual subject.
Does it show? Honestly, I don't know. I've shown two pulls from the same edition to people and told them one thing or the other, and no one has ever called it. But I also think it shows in a way that's not visual. It's more like... the prints have a temperament. Same face, different mood. If you stood them next to each other you'd probably feel it before you could point at it. Which sounds like mysticism and I normally hate that, but I've been doing this twenty years and I can't find a better way to say it.
Do you keep the failed washes? I keep the prints I should have destroyed, the ones where the heartbeat was off. They're my favorites.