Like mezzotint, etching, and aquatint, drypoint is an intaglio process, meaning that an image is cut into a plate, creating grooves that hold the ink. (The word “intaglio” is Italian, meaning to cut.) The plate is inked, the non-printing surface is wiped, and the ink is then transferred to paper under pressure. In contrast, relief prints—woodcut, wood engraving, and linocut—have a raised surface that carries the ink and makes an imprint. Although intaglio technologies were known earlier, intaglio printing did not become widely used until the fifteenth century, when paper became more available. The earliest prints were utilitarian, intended to impart information or render scenes, religious subjects, or maps. By the 1600s Rembrandt was able to combine drypoint with etching to create remarkably sensitive prints. Much later, Degas, Max Beckmann, and the Cubists updated drypoint as a medium for a range of personal expression. The most direct of the intaglio processes, drypoint requires only a sharp-pointed tool held like a pencil to inscribe the plate. Copper is most often chosen for drypoint plates because of its fine grain. The burr that is raised by the needle is quite fragile, limiting the number of good images that can be made from one plate. Corrections can be made to the plate using a metal burnisher and oil, which reduce the burr and smooth out surface scratches. Dampened rag paper is usually used for drypoint and the other intaglio processes. Dampening softens the fibers so they can be pressed into the grooves of the plate. The rag content increases the paper’s strength, allowing it to be dampened and pressed. Drypoint is done on an etching press, two heavy rollers with a moveable bed that travels between them under considerable pressure. The copper plate is laid on the press bed inked side up. A sheet of paper is laid on the plate and woolen blankets are carefully smoothed on top. A large wheel cranks the press bed through the rollers and out the other side. The pressure of the top roller compresses the felts and forces the paper into the grooves of the plate. The blankets suck up any extra moisture in the paper and this action pulls the ink up from the plate onto the paper. The pressure also embosses the paper where the plate lies, creating a depression called a couvée or plate mark. Several years ago I began to notice drypoints although I did not know what I was seeing. In 1999, as a raw novice, I signed up for a five-day class in drypoint taught by Susy Raxlen. Susy, when I first met her, seemed as exotic as the furry drypoint line. I loved her printing uniform: hiking boots and a black tutu with red velvet bows. In our first session we were each given a small copper plate and an incising tool. She told us to see what kind of marks we could make. Then Susy inked the plates and ran them through the press. On that first day of class, we printed directly onto a base sheet of cotton rag. We used German Etching paper, a warm-toned mould-made paper from the Hahnemuhle mill. German Etching is waterleaf, which makes it very absorbent. After the first prints, we began to use a technique called chine collé, in which a sheet of thin paper is simultaneously printed and adhered to a heavier base sheet. For the thinner paper or chine we used kitikata, a Japanese gampi paper. In this marriage of Eastern and Western papers, the physical properties and aesthetics of both fully express themselves. German Etching is thick, slightly textured, quietly resilient, and thoroughly supportive; kitikata is like a silk sheet laid on top, full of inner light. We tore the kitikata to about the size of the plate. The soft, uneven tear became an element in the print. The kitikata, glued on the back, was laid face down on the copper plate with a larger sheet of German Etching on top. Susy used wallpaper paste to adhere the chine. This sandwich was run through the press. If the chine did not completely cover the plate, the ink also printed on the base sheet, which extended several inches on all sides beyond the copper plate. The two papers received the ink differently and this became another element in the print. Sometimes the chine also extended in places beyond the plate, breaking out of the couvée. The parts that extend were not printed, creating another effect.  Early on in class we began using multiple plates, one with an incised image and one without, called a tone plate. We inked the tone plate first with a light color, which became a background wash. Then we inked the image plate with a darker color, usually brown or black, either warm or cool. Susy used a rag to rub a fair amount of ink onto the plates, then wiped them, either by hand or with tarlatan. (There are various approaches to wiping the plate. The image plate can be wiped very clean, leaving ink only in the bur; or an even film can be left over the whole plate; or the edges can be left with a heavier film. The film of ink left after wiping the tone plate can also be either even or uneven.) With two runs, the second color mixed with the first, which was still wet, creating a blend.  I found every aspect of the process beautiful: mixing the ink and rolling it on glass, the incised copper plates, the ink blotches on the tarlatan. I loved watching Susy use tarnished brass tabs like strange mechanical fingers to lift the damp paper, and the way she rubbed whiting (finely ground calcium carbonate) on her hands, then seemed to brush it off before she hand-wiped a plate.  Each student cut two or three plates. If we had been planning to make an edition, we would have found the most effective way to print a plate and then repeated that many times, exactly the same way. The class focus, however, was on monotypes. Printing the same plate in a number of very different ways necessarily creates series, even when the variations are very broad.  Since 1980 I have been making paper from local and imported fiber using Japanese, Korean, and Nepalese techniques. Each evening in preparation for the next class, I rummaged through my studio for elements to use in my prints. Daily I became more adventurous, grabbing an image of a young girl photocopied onto handmade paper, small squares of paper with Hebrew and Arabic I had picked up on a Jerusalem street, scraps of paper with suminagashi and potato printing.  When the class was over I continued printing with Susy in her studio. I did not consider buying a press and setting it up on my own. Collaborating with Susy relieves me of spending five to ten years learning the basic skills. More than that, I enjoy the collaborative process. In a good collaboration, the final work is ineffably more than either contributor could have produced singly. This involves a chemistry that makes working alone seem rather arid. Susy considers herself a printer in the European tradition, in which artists bring their already cut plates to print studios to be editioned. In a traditional studio, the process is not collaboration, as the artist and the printer do not even meet face to face. Instead, the artist gives his instructions to the head of the atelier who, in turn, tells the printer what is required. The printer has no input into ways to approach the print. After studying dance at UCLA, Susy got a job at a print studio that did editions for other artists. She found she liked printing. In the 1980s she moved to Montreal, and eventually found work at Atelier Circulaire where a French master printer, Francois Xavier Marange, was working. She had been printing long enough to feel fairly confident about her skills but she ran into difficulties with a plate. When she asked Marange for help, he started her back at the beginning. Through Marange, she gained a more grounded comprehension of intaglio in general and drypoint in particular.  The work at Atelier Circulaire was closer to collaboration than the traditional European model. Susy and Marange guided artists who had not printed before through the process of preparing plates and deciding how to print them. (The process is analogous to an artist with little experience with hand papermaking coming to a studio like Dieu Donné to create a series of works.) In 1992 Susy moved to Victoria, British Columbia, intending to continue printing for other people. She found few people to print for there, so she began to make her own prints. “Artists here expected to print for themselves. They thought paying a printer was too expensive, or that it was cheating. I had ink, I had time, I had curiosity,” says Susy. “I started making cards. One thing led to another until the cards weren’t cards anymore but prints.” Susy believes artists miss out by not understanding what a printer can do for them. “It takes twenty years of printing every day to learn to be proficient and achieve the subtleties that are possible in this process. Artists working on their own are limited by the narrowness of their skills. A printer has a whole vocabulary she can draw from which expands the artistic possibilities. The printer is paid to be anonymous. It takes a certain kind of person to be satisfied doing work of the printer, a person who is not ego-bound.” Drypoint is usually a pure medium bound by rules that grew out of the strict world of editioning, where the goal is to make each print exactly alike and as fast as possible. Printing monotypes, as Susy does now, frees the process. She began working this way in Montreal under Marange’s influence. He had been experimenting with printing on Japanese paper that already carried an image. Susy began to transfer photographic images to kitikata and to print on top. She also used tone plates, a technique favored by Marange. Consciously or unconsciously, a printer may impose his or her palette and aesthetics on the people she or he prints for. Somewhere between this and the traditional approach is the fertile ground of real collaboration. Once she began thinking of herself as an artist, Susy experimented with non-traditional papers and took chances she would not have taken with other people’s work. As she shared her ideas with the artists she was printing for, her studio became a clearinghouse for different approaches to drypoint printing. Susy now asks people to acknowledge her involvement when they exhibit work she has printed.  Now, before a day of printing, I put my work together. I may cut a new plate or rework an old one. Recently I did a series using a plastic material, hi-impact styrene, for plates. It is so much cheaper than copper that it frees me into a looser approach to cutting. Unfortunately, it is too soft to print more than one or two times. I look around my studio for the papers I want to use. Traditionally one sheet of chine is used in chine collé but I may have six or more pieces of paper layered in one print. I make diagrams of how the scraps go together along with notations of what plates I will use and what colors.  It takes us about five hours to do eight or ten prints. When I arrive, Susy brushes adhesive on the backs of the papers I have brought and sets them to dry on blotting paper, keeping them organized print by print. We put the plates, both copper and plastic, on a sheet of glass several inches above a hotplate. The warmth makes it easier to spread and wipe the ink. Susy finds inks we have mixed before (wrapped airtight they last quite a while) or mixes new inks, following my descriptions of colors I want. As Susy inks the plates, we discuss whether I want a hand-wiped surface (smoother, more subtle) or a tarlatan wipe (moodier, more dramatic); whether I want light in the center or somewhere else; whether I want the edges left heavily inked or clean. How the wiping is done determines how the original color of the paper speaks. Susy registers the tone plate on the press bed while I gather the elements that will go into the print and place them facedown on the plate. Susy lays a sheet of German Etching on top, smoothes the blankets over the whole construction and cranks the wheel. As the press bed emerges from the other side of the press, Susy lifts the blankets and replaces the tone plate with the image plate. She runs the press bed back through the press. I hold my breath as Susy unveils the damp print. We lay it under plastic with an interleaving sheet and begin the next print. Finally, I take the prints home and weight them between blotters. Once they are fully dry I decide whether I will work them further, usually by collaging on additional bits of paper or rubbing in powdered pigment.  My prints start out like collages though they do not end up that way. In collage I use papers that are folded, crumpled, or cockled. Whatever paper I put on top stays on top. The drypoints are very flat, but one has the sense of looking deep into a pool of water. Paper that lies below may rise up like a ghost image to declare itself. The top layer of paper is like the part of an iceberg that stands above the water; the lower layers are the blue green glow of ice under seawater.  For me, the printed image is essential. I rely on the furry dark line as the scaffolding and grit that holds the print. Occasionally, however, I use only a tone plate. (Susy often does this in her work. This is no longer drypoint since nothing is inscribed.) In traditional drypoint the paper itself is a silent vehicle for an image, which is the only message. In contrast, I see paper as both medium and message. The interplay of line on paper is the crux of my work. In printing an image over various papers in a range of tones, the dark line may come through clearly or it may be broken up. I leave the way the line and papers mesh largely to chance. Nevertheless, the print often falls together as if it had been carefully plotted. Years ago I came across this quotation: “Everything what you know you gotta use.” (Moishe Fogel of the Eighth Street Shul, quoted by Jonathan Boyarin) In this spirit, my years as a weaver and papermaker influence the approach and skills I bring to printmaking. Although I think carefully about the imagery scratched into the plate, it is only one part of the message. The real impact of the prints comes from the combination of the scratched image and multiple layers of paper. Many of the scraps I include in my prints are by-products of my paper sculpture and artist’s books. In my work, I am interested in surface quality. I starch and crinkle paper, rub in dried pigments to bring up texture, treat paper with wax, Crisco (inspired by Bridget O’Malley), or Dolph Smith’s magic graphite mix. I have little interest in being pristine. Once, when we were working on a too-clean print, Susy suggested I rub two plates together to create tiny surface scratches that would pick up the ink.  Layering can achieve various effects. Laying pieces of kitikata on top of each other creates a monochromatic palette of densities. The torn edges take the ink slightly darker, revealing a map of paper scraps. I sometimes stain the back of the kitikata with dry pigments, often metallic for a subtle shift in tone (pastels also work well). I love the subtlety of the torn or deckle edge, at times escaping the natural boundary of the couveé. A lower, sometimes buried paper comes through as color or shadow, or as the line created by a torn edge. I sew smaller pieces of kitikata together using spun paper thread in a running stitch, for another element in the print. Often I place a dark paper below, allowing only an eyebrow of color to show along the edge. It is sometimes difficult to figure out how the prints are made since the separate pieces become so totally integrated. Collaborating with Susy and with chance is like a deep well from which many surprises come and much incentive to experiment further. I include many elements in my prints: pages from old Japanese books (the kanji emerges through the layers of paper laid on top); tengujo and water-patterned lace papers (fine enough to read images below); konnyaku or tapioca-starched paper (though flattened in the press, they retain the sense of draped cloth); photographic images (fragments of kallotypes, Polaroid image and emulsion transfers, color or black-and-white photocopies) on kitikata. I have also used calligraphy practice sheets, rubbings, labels, seed packages, and maps. Sometimes the photographic and found imagery is not legible. Though I choose what to include for its abstract qualities, inevitably the found imagery becomes part of the message.  Many times my work includes text, often laid in upside down or backwards. I use bits of print and handwriting for the energy of the letters and the layered sense of palimpsest. The bits of text are message shards, like snatches of conversation overheard on a bus. In one series I photocopied cigarette packs found along the road onto kitikata. I was intrigued by their often beautiful graphics, partly worn away in the rain and their horrific health warnings, such as “Smoking can kill you.” I included spirit papers folded into the form of gold ingots and Mexican lotto cards: la calavera (skull and crossbones), la muerte (a skeleton with a sickle), and la corazon (an anatomical heart). I wondered if I could make prints where the initial impact would be their beauty with the subtext of disease and death creeping up as a surprise.  There is a myth in India: If you offer your rags to the Lord of Tatters, in return you will receive whole cloth. This seems especially apt for papermakers. The cycle of cloth wearing down to rags and then being recreated as whole cloth parallels the Indian idea of the cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation. This myth has become a metaphor for my drypoints. I collect the rags and tatters, the bits of paper that litter my studio, too small to do much with, too precious to discard. I lay them on the plate and run them through the press. The pressbed, like a small boat on a river at night, navigates the dark, shrouded in blankets. In the crossing, the rags and scraps are recast. I put myself in the hands of the Lord of Tatters. I hold my breath. Wait for whole cloth.