Sold the same etching to two people and now I want to know which one is the real one
I pulled the last two proofs of an etching yesterday, both from the same plate, same ink, same paper, and there is a visible difference. One is a little flatter in the greys. Not a mistake exactly, just the plate giving up a bit of itself.
Normally I would destroy the weaker one and keep the edition clean. But I found myself wanting to keep both, because the whole point of my work is that there is no original, and here I am quietly deciding which copy is the good one. The plate is the original. The print is the copy. Except the plate is now worn in a way the early prints are not. So the plate is also a record of everything I have done to it.
I don't have a resolution for this. I just think it is funny that you can spend years arguing that authenticity is a story we tell and then get precious about one sheet of damp paper.
Also I am aware this is a very comfortable problem to have, sitting in a studio in Kreuzberg with a hot plate and a stack of Fabriano. But it is genuinely the thing I keep circling.
Curious if the painters here feel anything like this about the first version of a painting, or if that is a printmaker's disease.
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I think you already answered yourself and just don't like the answer. The plate is not the original either, it is only older. It is a piece of zinc that holds a shape, and once you have pulled from it, that shape has already begun leaving. So the "true" version is not a thing, it is a moment.
I work in cyanotype, camera-less, so for me there is no plate at all, only the paper, the sun, the day. Two prints from the same fern and the same afternoon still come out different, and I stopped calling one the good one a long time ago. I keep them side by side and let them argue.
Keep both. The flatter one is not weaker, it is later. Someday that difference will be the only record of how tired the plate was, and you will be glad you did not throw the witness away.
The cyanotype thing is where I want to push back a little. You gave up the plate, so nothing carries forward, and every print is its own weather. Fine. But the printmaker's problem is that something does carry forward, and it carries by wearing down. The plate is not the original, agreed, but it is the witness. It is the only object in the room that remembers every pull.
I have spent thirty years building rooms out of things other people carried to the skip. If I believed the copy was only a copy I would have no work. The used thing is not less true than the new thing. Usually it is more.
Keep both, yes. But do not let them argue. That makes it a contest, and there is no judge. Put them one above the other so the grey tells you what the plate gave up between them. That is the actual document. The plate talking to itself.
"The witness" is the word I will steal from you, and I mean it as a compliment. It resolves something I was circling: the plate is not the original, and it is not the copy either. It is a record of every hand that ever pulled from it, including mine, including the bad days.
Thirty years of other people's skips. That is the part I keep coming back to. My whole apparatus is built for the opposite: the clean edition, the numbered run, the proof that gets destroyed so the set stays honest. And here I am defending a pale proof like it is a child.
The thing I cannot settle: if the plate is the witness, then the last pulls are the most witnessed, and they are also the ugliest. So the truth is in the worn ones and the beauty is in the early ones. Which means the market and I want opposite things from the same object. I do not know what to do with that except keep both, which is what I was going to do anyway.
"Only older" is the part I keep turning over. I called the plate the original because it is the thing that stays, but you are right that it stays by eroding. There is no stable term in the whole equation, only a rate of change.
The sun and the day instead of the plate, though. At least my plate gives me a lie I can hold, something to point at and call the source. Yours has no alibi at all. Does that make the work freer, or just harder to talk about? Because I suspect I would still find a way to rank the two ferns.