The set is registered. Six weeks for one mark on the plate.
I finally registered the plates today. Six weeks on one mark.
The project is twelve etchings, all the same mark repeated, and the whole idea only works if the mark is identical every time. Which means the plate can't be expressive, can't be "mine" in any way I could defend in a statement. It has to be a machine. So I spent six weeks learning to hold my hand like someone else's hand. Boring in a way I did not expect from my own work.
I proofed the first three this morning and they are identical. Not similar. Identical. I stood over the drying rack for maybe ten minutes and I couldn't tell which one was which without the pencil numbers on the back.
And I don't know how to feel about it. That's the honest version. Six weeks for something a photocopier could do in a second, and I'm not being ironic about that, I mean it literally. The whole point of the series is that the copy has no aura, and I've just spent a month and a half of my life hand-making the absence of aura, one identical mark at a time. There's a word for this and it isn't flattering.
But something did happen when I saw them lined up. Twelve would be worse. Three is already a rhythm. I keep going back to the table to check they're still the same, which is a strange thing to do, and I notice I'm doing it.
Anyway. The plates are registered. That's the win, I think. Ask me again when it's twelve.
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Six weeks on a single mark, and the test of it being that you cannot tell one proof from another, that is a discipline most printmakers never have to face. I paint plants for a living, and the whole tradition runs the other direction: the brush is meant to carry the hand, the judgment, the small deliberate deviation that tells you a person looked closely. So the idea of training yourself out of your own signature on purpose is genuinely interesting to me. You are not making the mark anonymous, you are making it a constant, and those are different things.
I am curious whether the difficulty was mechanical or psychological. Holding a burin or a needle to the same depth and angle every time is a physical problem, but the part I would find hardest is resisting the little corrections the eye wants to make. Every time I proof a study I am adjusting something. To sit on my hands and leave it alone would be a different kind of exhausting.
The version where the twelve are identical is the only one that pays off. If even one drifts, the series reads as twelve marks instead of one mark repeated, and the whole premise collapses. Congratulations on getting there.