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You are here: Home / Archives for modern printing methods

What is a Transfer Print? (Artist Statement)

April 26, 2012 by Iskra 4 Comments

In a transfer print the plate is created by printing files from a computer imaging program like Photoshop onto an acetate carrier sheet. For initial output I use an Epson 3800 with archival ink. After the carrier sheet is sprayed with a solvent  the ink becomes liquified enough to transfer to paper or another surface through careful burnishing. Alternatively the plate is pressed by hand or roller onto a sheet of paper that has been soaked with gel alcohol, a solvent that transfers the ink to the paper without harming the paper’s surface. Each paper takes the ink completely differently. Soft watercolor or printmaking papers may absorb the ink with a fair amount of predictability, while others react with magical surface qualities that have a life of their own. The effects range from the dry paper-texture of letterpress to a granulation similar to aquatint or the watery translucency of traditional monoprints.

It takes a great deal of repetition and attention to detail to pull one successful print. I have learned that timing, humidity, pressure, and subtle overprinting or vandalism of the same plate multiple times can all have an effect on the image and whether it succeeds. In many ways the moment of printing is like calligraphy in its exactitude, physicality and openness to the accidents of the moment.

The photographic transfer process allows me to work with the full-color lushness of photographic reality. Like traditional printmaking there is a plate, and it is hands on, but unlike traditional processes you can print all colors at once. I’m really trying to figure out where a photograph lives in the world now. I love the luminous intensity of photography when seen on screen, but when the computer shuts off the image is gone. Photographs on paper don’t have the same back-lit radiance, and unless they are very carefully printed on fine paper, they may feel less like a “print” and more like “output.” In some ways, with the dazzling improvements in retina display, the computer monitor version of a photograph may begin to feel more like the “original” and the paper print the lesser reproduction.  Our world now has trillions of images, with more being born every second, an endless stream of brilliant photographic candy flowing across our monitors and phones. The sheer volume and immediacy of images, the constant now leaves no time for absorption (or what used to be called “meaning”) and threatens to wear out our collective synapses. What can a print, a fixed piece of paper, offer in this new world?

I am interested in artifact, object, a thing of presence that arrests you, makes you pause, and puts you back in human-centered time. But I also think the human brain is being reconfigured by new technologies, and they can’t really be ignored. The way Photoshop builds images mirrors our minds and how we remember and layer experience. Photoshop also mirrors a printing press, with the ability to stack “plates” in layers, with each layer affecting the one below in truly magical ways that can only be done with this tool. What interests me is how the new media can be integrated with the old, the tactile with the digital.

The transfer process is time intensive and very sensual. Every inch of the image is transferred by the pressure of my hand as the damp paper takes the ink from the plate. It can take up to a dozen prints to get one that has just the right balance of subtle surface texture and ink density, and each print takes about an hour to completely transfer. The images layered into the final plate merge digital photographic elements, enlargements of older analog prints, and the other media I work in, such as powdered pigment and paint. It’s exciting to feel that two very different worlds can be integrated. Older ways of making are not “obsolete” — they can be revisioned and combined with the new in ways that reflect the complexity of what it is to be alive in this time.

Filed Under: Featured Post, Transfer Prints Tagged With: about transfer prints, digital printing, modern printing methods, monoprint, photographicness, photography, the camera's eye, the street, what is a transfer print?, work about the camera

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Sunday studies of motion and emotion. I’ve been Sunday studies of motion and emotion. I’ve been in an obstinately “unproductive” space this past week, but used my time well. Motion: I went swimming for the first time in 5 years; in the autumn’s holy light, the lake is a sacrament. Emotion: I watched three years of The Split in four days. Cried my eyes out. In awe of acting and a script this good. Sometimes you just have to take a vacation from yourself and let other people do life for you. On Hulu, BBC possibly the best relationship drama I have seen.
I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in wh I’ve written a wild-mind sort of blog post in which I let the story of place, museums, witness and culture unfold as it wishes. It’s an old-style post before I had “newsletter consciousness.” (Sigh….when you send out a post with one image and a show announcement and maybe five more words and someone writes, “perfect length to view on my phone” you may be tempted to perform more of the same and forget the original muse, born long before success was judged by how well thoughts fit within 2x5” square inches. A few excerpts here and first link in bio to read the entirety. Witness and elegy is where I seem to live. Painting is acrylic ink on panel, a piece I have yet to resolve but like to see into for the next step.
If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s If you are born on 9.11 take back this day. It’s still yours! Yesterday I started early and went to an island in the middle of the blue sea to be in beauty and celebrate life. As we walked the beach we met a young boy also born on 9.11. His parents had brought him to Vashon for the same reason, and he had found a perfect moon shell for his own birthday present sent from the sea. It was such a lovely moment, to remember the world is young no matter how old we are.
Taking the last golden days of summer for study. T Taking the last golden days of summer for study. The Volunteer Park museum has an exhibit showing the influence of the Edo arts in Japan on Toulouse-Lautrec and I went to see it last weekend. As you can see from these images, I seem to have no interest in Lautrec— True! But these details of woodcuts and paintings on silk fill me with a quiet rapture.
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RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid RIP Brian McBride, The Stars of the Lid

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