I have bought eight copper plates at 10 inches by 8 inches at 4 UKP each. This is half price as slightly battered seconds. This suits me. The whole issue of value and price and the expense or preciousness of things can be a factor in these things. I am rich enough to use the best paper without worrying too much these days and everything I have done has been printed on top dollar paper over the past couple of years. It isn’t as if I am doing a lot of it so why not use the best stuff I can afford? I still have art materials mouldering which I have bought and then felt that they were too intimidatingly expensive to use. Which is absurd and has to do with worth and what my work is worth and so on. Runs deep that sort of thing. Or it does with me. Of course a lot of my work is done with barely useable materials at school. I have become adept at getting the best out of cheapish poster. We do use a better class of poster these days and that makes a difference it must be said.
Anyway, as I badly resin up two plates and one left over from last year, I formulate some sort of plan to make a suite of eight prints before Christmas. A sort of etching diary and use it to try to think out what I think about this. Work it out with a pin, as it were. The etching has forced me back towards a more classic idea of drawing in a way. It has made me draw things with a pen or a sharp pencil as that its what translates into an etching more than my more usual soft lead. And it has made me do more observational drawings and has pushed me away from my previous ‘hedonistic mark making’.
Can You Tidy Up Now Please? 
I’ve also as it happens bought some copper plates-I’ve always used zinc, or scratched on plastic, but someone said very dictatorially the other day that copper was the only medium, because it will do exactly what you want, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t use this ‘expensive’ medium. In some ways the problem is to make etching work for our way of saying things, to avoid (without straining) the look of etchings from the grand 19th/20th century period of etching -looking through lots of these I’m struck by the fact that they not only look alike (similar treatments of the subject) but that the range of subjects seems to be restricted to those considered proper for etching, which is a narrow gamut.
I’d like to draw like me, but in etching – difficult. I’m also doing WordPress, but site only partly up, -both slowness & lack of competence Cheers David
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Thanks for the comment which are apposite, as ever. You will notice that there is no further mention of etching in the blog, despite the best of intentions. The etching plates still molder in the art room cupboard. I just couldn’t get going on them for some of your reasons there. I seem to have got to a level of competence which is OK but my patience and interest in going to the next level of multiple aquatints and so on just isn’t there. I can use it as another way to draw with the multiple bites and different strengths of line which I like a lot and which is different to other sorts of mark making, but beyond that it is becoming something else.
The Intangibilities of Form by John Roberts spoiled my summer. Bitter, misguided and rather joyless, going on about the post-Cartesean artist, large expanses written in a made up jargon of his own; I don’t think the guy likes art reall or gets out much. But, he has a point. Certainly he makes it difficult to do Romantic expressive craft-based art again; for a bit anyway.
My art making since the summer has been largely directed towards being expressive through more indirect means or towards using craft in another manner besides my usual. In a way there’s nothing that says middle school art room like a piece of slightly on the huh ceramics. Though expect some computer use too. The theorists see this as being the ultimate in weightless, post object art.
Good luck with the WordPress. I intend to continue my push into the ether with a website in the new year. http://www.paulcope.com Happy New Year and take care in the snow.
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