Читать книгу Lithography For Artists - Анон - Страница 2

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IT IS suggested that one who puts out a technical book should begin by telling his public reasons why it should believe what he says. Reluctantly conforming to this, I will say that I was trained as a painter, also as an etcher, and have paid in time and labor the price necessary to the mastery of the operations involved in both the art and craft of crayonstone lithography. Here is brought into co-operation an artist’s lifelong familiarity with artistic problems and a technical grasp of the craft side of the matter—from graining the stone to flattening the finished proofs. The British Museum has a practically complete set of my prints, presumably as works of art; while in the offices of the heads of several of the best lithographic firms in New York they also may be seen hanging, bought and placed there as examples of craftsmanship. For a year I worked with my stones and presses in London. Then I brought them over to my present home at Woodstock, New York. Here I have gradually rounded out a sufficiently complete equipment. Here it is that I have done my private work, and here people sometimes come to study with me. Here in 1919 I put out what I think was the first published offer in this country to teach artistic lithography. When I go down from this rustic retreat to New York, it is generally to work for the rest of the world—write, lecture, print, exhibit—whatever comes up to be done.

As I have worked—making my own lithographs I mean—I have kept up a continuous and extensive experimenting with a view to subordinate to my purposes various new substances and methods. The bulk of the information thus obtained has had only a negative value; but in a few instances, important inventions of interest to artists generally have resulted. I have not, however, in cases where these are incorporated in succeeding chapters, thought it worth while to cumber my pages with a continual patter of remarks as to how this or that formerly was, or now is, done by others. Anyone who wants to may do this; and it would be of interest, for sometimes the new usages vary so widely from the old as to constitute almost a new art. Indeed, when working thus, solely for my own artistic aims, I have found this almost-new lithography more rewarding, more tempting to new fields, more certain of getting results, more lovely in results when got, than I ever dreamed was possible when I began.

Probably that particular new contribution which can be most readily appreciated is the one which puts into our hands a power, somewhat like that of the plate printer, to get tints and tones and richnesses by manipulations of oil and draggings of ink on the copper plate. The lithographic achievement of analogous results is entirely new. The results it is, not the process, which are analogous, for you cannot smear your ink and oil on stone as you can on copper. The means are unique, but the results are a richness suggestive of charcoal, mezzotint—effects of great beauty, and, as I said, not hitherto obtained, or possible, in lithography.

That I have written in a highly condensed and, from a literary point of view, unrewarding style is explained by the fact than any other style would have led on to a book of quite impracticable dimensions. Lithography has been to me for so many years a matter of purely personal adventure, full of the ups and downs that give fascination to any adventure, with high times of success and low times of black failure, that were my purpose other than to bottle up the maximum of facts in the minimum of space, I might have thrown it into the form of a personal story. Early and late I have plugged along, drawn always by something that was just eluding me—something, in the midst of dirty clothes and calloused hands, shining and beautiful. Sometimes it has been one thing and sometimes another; but always it was just beyond; to be captured and embodied tomorrow or next week or next summer. And when I have gone abroad and met and visited with professional printers, it has pleased me to find that, bound though they were to the chariot wheels of commerce, they, as well as I, experienced something of this glamor, something not quite to be explained—a sense of undiscovered possibilities, it may be. One said—and he had grown gray with the roller in his hands—“Oh, you will always keep finding out new things.” And for that I loved him, and our craft.