| The
Painter becomes a Printmaker
Ask most printmakers how they got started and they will tell you
about wandering into a printing studio late one night or perhaps
tell you a story about a teacher with black fingernails. Ask Dorian
Allworthy, and you’ll hear about an illicit goat feeding episode.
The severity of her infraction is not entirely clear, but she felt
guilty enough to feel caught when a young man entered the petting
zoo barn. Soon, however, she sensed that he too was an outlaw and
encouraged him to join the frenzy. Somehow the high sign was passed,
and the two realized that they were both artists. When they parted,
he pulled from his pocket some copper etching plates and presented
them to her as a token of newfound friendship. This was Dorian’s
initiation into the black art of printmaking. Knowingly or not,
the stranger would cause Dorian to break an injunction far more
serious than that against feeding livestock. Eight years earlier,
her beloved adoptive father, painter Joseph Allworthy, had forbidden
her to continue drawing—an artistic passion and self imposed
discipline that she had pursued in reaction against what she regarded
as the superficial works of fellow art students at the Pennsylvania
Academy. Joe believed in the purity of painting and encouraged her
to focus on light and color, leaving line to take care of itself.
So her pencil had required no sharpening for the remainder of Joe’s
life. The chance gift of metal plates helped to free her to chart
her own artistic direction.
Dorian set about teaching herself to
make prints. Instead of the fluidity and freedom of etching or the
chameleon-like versatility of lithography, she chose the intractable
demands of drypoint—the direct incision of lines into metal
with the tip of a sturdy needle. The technique involves a number
of trade-offs. It is very direct but equally demanding. It allows
the artist to produce rich, velvety lines by raising a ridge—or
burr—of metal above the surface of the printing plate. This
burr transfers an added charge of ink in the printing process to
make the rich—“burry”—lines. Artists whose
names are long forgotten pioneered this technique in Germany in
the 15th century. A generation later, the great Albrecht Dürer
elevated drypoint to a high art, but he made only a few examples.
He was probably dismayed by the rapidity with which the burry effects
attenuated as the raised bits of metal wore away. In 17th-century
Holland, Rembrandt engaged with drypoint more profoundly than any
artist before or since. Apparently he aimed his most ambitious drypoints
at a circle of connoisseurs who could appreciate his unique abilities.
Since then, artists as different as Whistler, Kirchner, and Diebenkorn
both made drypoint a mainstay of though in completely different
ways—soft as a brush, forceful as an ax, and calculatedly
hesitant.
So there was Dorian, who had not drawn
for eight years, setting out to become a graphic artist in a medium
that demands draftsmanship so definite that each stroke is inscribed
in metal. Typical Dorian—if you want to learn to swim, dive
into the deep end.
Dorian’s autodidactic procedure
often involved the production of copies—a very traditional
approach. Her copies are by no means slavish. Taking images from
books or magazines, she translates them into a linear vocabulary
that attempts to match her control of values in her paintings. Here
she operates in a separate world of images, detached from her usual
realm of observation and experience. Where in her paintings do we
see elephant families, prize fights, and saloon gamblers? In these
works, she sees through the eyes of others and the resulting body
of work exists in a netherworld between illustration and perception.
Of the boxers, she reports that she likes the subject, even though
she would like to remain distant from its reality. At this writing
she continues to alter the plate, but the last impression that I
saw spoke to her distance from the subject.
Other of Dorian’s prints seem
more like a direct extension of her painting. They have the direct
engagement that marks her work when the motif inspires her. Her
studies of dogs are filled with her delight in and sympathy for
these creatures. “Lucky Dog” and Samson are portraits
of friends. Even without descriptive surroundings, the figures exist
in space and have personality. A plate in which Dorian proves that
she has hit her stride is the straight-on head study of a heavy-lipped,
lop-eared dog. The glassy surface of the eye, loose skin, and underlying
mass of bone and muscle are all convincingly rendered. The viewer
truly gets the sense that the unblinking dog looks right back at
him.
Dorian seldom produces a numbered,
limited edition of uniform impressions from her plates. Instead
she explores the potential within a given image by printing variant
impressions from the plate. For her, each and every impression is
a unique work of art. Between impressions, she frequently reworks
her plates, sometimes adding new lines, scraping away lines that
no longer please her. Many printmakers are fanatical about preserving
the drypoint burr. Often they electroplate iron onto the surface
to strengthen it. Dorian accepts the degradation of her delicate
plates. She finds that as lines break down, they can create soft,
appealing tonalities. Her work becomes an organic process in which
her work causes the plate simultaneously to degrade and to be renewed.
At times the image on the plate becomes so difficult to see that
she works as much by touch as by sight.
Many contemporary painter/printmakers
rely on professional printers to produce an edition from a plate.
Dorian does her own printing. She uses an old press given to her
by the same artist who gave her those first plates. At the press,
she continues her explorations of the image beyond the work on the
plate itself. Dorian’s interest in tone and color has led
her to vary her inks and their application. Lately Dorian has begun
using thicker, more viscous ink. It seems to appeal to her painterly
interest in the subtle manipulation of tonal values. What the whites
are to her painting, the grays are to her drypoints. She tries papers
of different thickness, color, and texture. A highly unusual technique
that Dorian came to independently—without the knowledge that
Picasso had tried it in the 1930s—involves the arrangement
of bits of colored tissue on the printing surface so that they adhere
to the main sheet of paper under the force of the press. Dorian
calls the process “spot chin collé. It produces an
effect somewhat like stenciled watercolor.
Artists often place tight restrictions
on their own work. Whether or not Dorian will continue to confine
herself to drypoint as the means to work her plates remains to be
seen. Etching and its cousins, such as aquatint and sugarlift, have
proven attractive to many contemporary painters, especially those
who collaborate with master printers. Perhaps the visceral physical
challenge of drypoint and its simple, unyielding demands hold for
Dorian more appeal than the less direct chemically-based processes.
Recently, a friend urged her approach the printing of each impression
with the intention of making it the best work of art that she has
ever made. I hope that she doesn’t let that advice make her
too self-conscious. It is easy to see the pleasure that she finds
in painting. Years of application and ingenuity are now beginning
to yield a similar sense of gratification in her printmaking.
Tom Rassieur
February 2005
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