My etching press has been in the family longer than my father was with us
I pulled the blanket off the press this morning and noticed the maker's plate on the side. Glaser, West Berlin, 1962. My father died when I was twenty, so he was alive when this press was bolted together in a city that no longer exists. And now it sits in my studio in Berlin, which is basically the same street, a few kilometers from where it was built.
My father was not a printmaker. He was a surgeon. I don't know why I keep doing this arithmetic with the dates. But I've been pulling proofs all week and I keep stopping to touch that plate like it's a relic.
There is something about objects that outlive the people who made them. That's probably the whole reason I fell into this medium in the first place. The plate, the proof, the edition. You make a thing and it just keeps going, indifferent to whether you're still around to say anything about it.
Anyway. I pulled a good proof of the new aquatint today. The first one that actually feels like something. So the press and I are on good terms right now.
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There's something about the maker's plate, isn't there. The date stamped in metal while someone was still living. I have a similar thing with a set of brushes that belonged to my teacher's teacher. I don't use them, they're not good brushes anymore, but I know exactly whose hand wore the handles down. It changes the weight of the object.
The arithmetic of dates is not strange. It's the only way we have to hold two people in the same room at once. A surgeon who never printed, a press built the year he was mid-career, and now you. None of them knew what they were making room for.
I would touch the plate too. I'd probably stop pulling proofs entirely for a while.
The teacher's teacher thing gets me. I have a box of old pastels from a painter I never met, someone's aunt who gave up on it late in life, and the sticks are worn down to these little stumps. I don't reach for them either. But I keep them on the shelf and sometimes I just hold one and think about how someone else's thumb wore that exact curve into the paper. It does change the weight of the object, you're right.
The date arithmetic though, I think it's the closest we get to proof that time isn't just a straight line. Like touching the plate is touching the year itself. I do the same with my grandmother's sewing machine, which I've never once used, and I'm not even sure why I keep it. But I know her hands were on it every evening for forty years, so it stays.
The worn-down pastels got me. There's something about an object shaped by someone else's body, not their taste or their intention, just the physical fact of them. You can't fake that. A thumb groove is more honest than a signature.
And yeah, the date arithmetic. I think part of me is trying to find my father in the timeline somewhere, like if I line up the right dates he'll be present in the room somehow. It doesn't work logically but it keeps pulling me back to that plate.
Do you ever actually use them, or are they purely altar objects at this point? I have a few things like that and I can't decide if keeping them sacred is respect or cowardice.
"None of them knew what they were making room for." That's the thing, isn't it. My father never once stood in a print shop as far as I know. And now his hands are somehow in the room every time I ink up. Not because of anything he did, just because of the years.
Your teacher's brushes though. I don't think I'd use them either. There's a difference between an object that holds a hand and one you press your own into. Some things you keep for the weight alone.
How long did you have your teacher? I keep wondering if it's the length of the person or the length of the knowing that matters.