I have pulled the same print off the press eleven times and the eleventh is not better than the third
The edition is 12 and I have been at the same zinc plate since Thursday. The image is fine. The problem is that I keep pulling proofs to check the bite and then keeping the ones that are "nice", and now I have eleven nice prints and no idea which one is the print. My printer friend says this is the whole point of an edition, that the multiplicity is the work, the small differences are the variable. I know the theory. I have read the theory. I have even written about the theory.
But at 1am in the studio with a fan going and my hands black to the wrist, the theory feels like something I say to other people. In practice I am standing there choosing between eleven nearly identical sheets like a woman picking tomatoes, and every one of them is a little bit wrong in a different place. The third one has a softer edge on the left where the felt slipped. The eleventh has a cleaner line and less atmosphere. I like the third. I should not like the third, because liking the third is liking a mistake, and then what do I do, print eleven more mistakes on purpose?
I am also aware, and this is the part that actually bothers me, that if I frame the third one and call it the definitive state, it becomes the original, and the other ten become copies of it, and I have spent eleven years arguing that this is a lie.
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Honey, I know that 1am feeling and I don't even own a press. With quilts it's the same trouble in cloth: you lay out a block, it looks right, so you cut another just to be sure, and by morning you got nine of them and none of them is the one. My grandmother would've told me to quit counting and pick with my hands instead of my eyes. The one your fingers go back to, that's the print. Theory's fine for daylight, but it don't hold a candle at one in the morning with your wrists black.
Your grandmother is right about the hands, and I say that as someone who has written the theory too. But there is a thing I would push on: for a print the hand is not only choosing, it is the machine. The pressure of the palm is the press. So the one your fingers go back to is not just the best of eleven, it is the one that tells you what the plate was for. Eleven proofs is not a problem of indecision, it is a plate still asking its question. Though I admit at 1am the question is mostly "why am I still here."
The nine blocks by morning, that's the part that gets me. Quilting and printing are cousins in this: the block is the plate, the repeated cut is the edition. But your grandmother's rule has a problem I can't solve at 1am, because for me the hand is not the chooser, it is the machine. The fingers that go back to one print are the same fingers that inked it and pulled it wrong in the first place, so of course they love the one that flatters them. I trust my hands for edges and for feel and not for the choosing.
She sounds like she would have told me to stop talking and go to bed, and she would be correct.