oliversternart
Art Process Blog
Personal archive, thoughts on development, intaglio and drawing
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States 1 and 2
Made at the same time as the last etching, this one came together in fewer states.
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State 5
This is the most ambitious etching I’d done yet in terms of building up detail with different techniques like burnishing, soft ground and aquatint. I did 8 or so steps, trying to layer different elements to render the brush.
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States 1, 2, 3, and 4.
In the month before I walked the entire Schuylkill, I felt like I was at a standstill with my art. There were so many different directions I could go in, but I still felt limited to the the shore of the river I used to visit when I was growing up, and attempted to render it in as much detail as I could. There was less room for subjectivity, and I didn’t know how to depict the essence of what interested me about the river. I knew I would make discoveries on my walk, but until then, I only had my past experiences to look back on.
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The first etching I made at Second State Press. I had to learn the studio and new techniques like spray aquatint. I went in with no plan, starting with drypoint and then heavy handed layers of softground and aquatint. It started to feel like I had started over from scratch, and I realized I didn’t know how to anticipate what the copper would do. I knew I had a lot to learn.
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When I came back in the summer, I spent my first few weeks drawing for a couple hours each day by the river. I wanted to find a way to capture the richness of the brush and the fluid quality of water. I started thinking about ways to adapt my process to mimic the energy and motion of water.
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Day to night to day, drypoint and water bite gradients
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Largest etching I’ve made, finally started giving the compositions some more space
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2 states of the same etching. At this point I left my softground in for a while, never knowing how dark it would come out. Over time I started to learn how to read the plate, make more tests and work cautiously.
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The first etching I did back at school. My professor introduced me to a way of underpainting with dense softground texture. The entire spring, I made highway nightscapes inspired by the harsh light and noise of the infrastructure surrounding the river.
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I worked with my new ideas from winter in Cave Painting 2, my first show at school. It was an insane collaborative project I did with a friend, where we stayed in the same room for 5 days and filled a 900 square foot canvas with drawing. I was once again forced to draw in separation from my subject. Everything I had worked on in the fall was coming back, but this time I wanted to give it more depth, value and texture, and unpack my experiences from that winter.
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I experienced a lot that winter while exploring the river. I went back to the places I had been drawing from far away and realized everything was more complicated than what I had been creating. I understood there was a lot of room for my art to grow, but I felt limited by the idea of drawing something directly. By the end of the winter, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, but I hadn’t made much art aside from a couple sketches.
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Now it’s winter, back home, while they were halfway done taking it down
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Back to the tower, one of the first things I drew in school.
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