1. Choices

When I was eight years old in France, I told my art teacher I was going to be just like her, and she said no, donít be a teacher like me, be an artist. My mother gave up her career as an artist to raise us, so for me it was pretty much decided then. I knew I was going to be an artist, and forty years later I am still exploring this indefinite path.

Perhaps the mystery of the unfamiliar lured me to choose graphic arts as my major in college when I lived in Paris. Perhaps older friends, two artists from Hungary whom I observed building an etching press in their apartment, influenced me. Back then my choice of printmaking was more physical and emotional than intellectual. The processes, their variety, and the delicacy of their particular qualities attracted me. In Paris from 1972 to 1975 I learned the traditional techniques of etching, aquatint, hard and soft grounds, lithography, silkscreen, and many others.

Printmaking is still today a continuous learning experience for me. The physical component to printmaking involves a third dimension whereby etched plates and lithographic stones become microscopically sculpted surfaces where acids have, in a metaphorical sense, bitten away or enhanced reality.  Printmakers use chemistry: different metals are bitten in different acids, grounds are made soft or hard, and stones react to different strengths of acids. The hand tools used to mark the metal or the stone, the crayons, the etching needle, burins, roulettes, and scrapers demand both strength and dexterity. The physicality of printmaking is even more pronounced in the printing process. The printerís hand touches this third dimension of an etched plate, which is accentuated by the length of time it sits in the acid. These fine grooves determine how much ink is held, how deeply the dampened paper will emboss. The printing press responds to laws of gravity and compression, muscle and sweat, wise adjustments to the metal gauge, and careful timing to control the humidity of the paper. If all is done well, the right pressure picks up most of the ink on an etched plate or stone. This process is like cooking a superb meal, and there is an absolute high in that concentration.

Back then in the early seventies I was not interested in photography; my background was only drawing and painting. Drawing on an etching plate felt like performing a sacred ritual: every process and every step had a reason and a consequence. I was learning to make an etching as I was learning to live life. At the same time I became interested and briefly active in the feminist movement in Paris, trying to define my boundaries and my identity. At the age of eighteen I found myself living alone in a sixth floor walkup maidís room. Suddenly I was free from my parents' authority, and I became the master of my own body.

As it happened, I made my first etchings in 1972. These dealt with the subject of deciding whether to become a mother. The images related to the physical transformation of a womanís body, with almost monstrous expansions of the stomach. Those images also dealt with the roles assigned to man and woman in our society, as if I was looking for my place in relationship to others. My work still addresses this theme today but more elaborately.

I did not find my place in France and I wanted to discover other cultures, so I left and traveled the globe for about a year and a half, recording my journey in a book of watercolors and writings. During that time I studied Balinese painting in Indonesia and Sumi-e painting in Japan, where I lived for six months. In the fall of 1977, I settled in New York City and joined Michael Ponce de Leonís printmaking class at the Art Students League. I was his monitor for seven years, from 1978 to 1984, while I also studied printmaking with Seong Moy.

Influences

My years as a League student were unforgettable. Our classes were comprised of a remarkable group of people from different countries, many of which I had just visited. My recent journey as well as the international student body of the League and of New York City contributed greatly to the direction I chose in my work. We were all from a different place, and we were all somehow the same. From the late seventies until about 1990 I searched for metaphysical ideals in nature and the universe. I tried to depict the transcendence between the physical and the spiritual world. The mountains I painted of the Himalayas in India or of Machu Picchu in Peru were to me highly spiritual grounds. My etchings of the cosmos and of galaxies were a search for a higher power in our universe. I became intrigued and inspired in my work by the idea of unity as opposed to the individual. At the same time in life I embraced individuality. I was never concerned about fitting in; I believed that just producing my artwork made me exist. I joined a group of artists and writers downtown, and we called ourselves New York Visionaries. We had meetings, shows, and discussions of what the art world should be.

Michael Ponce de Leon was himself a visionary of some sort. He had also traveled extensively, and some of his work also dealt with metaphysical subjects, such as the embossing The Oneness of Life, which might explain our affinity for one another. His way of teaching was very subtle. Superficially, one might have thought that he did not teach you much. He always kidded around and told sexist jokes. But I absolutely revered him and loved his work and his class. His foremost legacy to me is the freedom to experiment. His teaching style was simply to show us what he was working on. He exposed his students to a huge array of ideas, attempts, and achievements by bringing his work to class or inviting us for studio visits.

He let the students do what they wanted, with no limits or rules as to what could be done. Unlike the traditional ways of melting and rolling grounds on plates that I had learned in Europe, Michael was willing to use prefabricated liquid grounds so that we could apply it more easily on large-scale work. He also encouraged me to use different kinds of metals, papers, textures, shapes, and dimensions.

I had not realized how much he influenced me until 1983 when I produced my first very large montage of etchings, comprised of thirteen plates. The following montages of etchings, produced between 1984 and 1986, were also large-scale and three- dimensional, with folded and raised paper. Their sculptural quality was very much influenced by the work of Michael Ponce de Leon.

Evolution in medium and content

The League has a long tradition of recognizing the importance of every art form. William Henry Fox Talbot discovered photographyís expressive possibilities in 1839. Although some may still refuse to acknowledge it, this medium was finally established as a recognized art form. It is impossible to deny the growing place of photography in todayís art world. Michael Ponce de Leon and Robert Rauschenberg are both League artists who produced groundbreaking work that incorporated photographs in their prints. In fact, Michaelís photo etchings and photolithographs were what prompted Stewart Klonis to invite him to teach at the League. While these processes intrigued me, Michael could not teach them because at that time the Leagueís printmaking studios were not equipped for these techniques.

In early 1990 my interests returned to photographic images combined with different graphic processes, and here my choice of media assumed a theoretical aspect. I became more interested in the significance of the printmaking process than in its aesthetic result. The ideas of deconstruction and plurality in postmodernism intrigued me, and I started to apply these concepts in my work. For example, I  made photo etchings in the Maternity Series from whole rolls of film that I would etch, print, re-etch, until the image deconstructed and disappeared. That disappearance signified to me that the circle of life was complete, from birth to death, from creation to oblivion.

One may ask why one would choose to make prints rather than paint or sculpt. In Prints and Visual Communication William M. Ivins wrote that

The various ways of making prints (including photography) are the only methods by which exactly repeatable pictorial statements can be made about anything.This exact repetition of pictorial statements has had incalculable effects upon knowledge and thought, upon science and technology, of every kind. It is hardly too much to say that since the invention of writing there has been no more important invention than of the exact repeatable pictorial statement.  

Learning new languages

I became interested in photography and learned all of its processes at Hunter College, where the late photographer Mark Feldstein taught me to shoot, process, and develop film of all sizes. He taught me how to print on many kinds of paper and how to sensitize various materials such as fabrics, wood, or stone, and to process photographic images on such materials. I learned how to use old cameras, how to control the number of exposures on each frame. Mark Feldstein was an incredibly gifted teacher. At the same time, I went to the Blackburn Printmaking workshop and learned the techniques of photo etching and photolithography, which back then were very toxic. I learned photogravure at Lothar Osterburg Studio in Chelsea, New York. After graduation I worked as the monitor of the printmaking workshop at Hunter College, where I taught myself the newer and safer techniques of photo etching with polymer film, which I first heard about from Deli Sacilotto and Michael Pellettieri. Back then very few people knew anything about that process, so I just experimented and kept making plates until I developed a satisfactory result and procedure. A year later I taught a course on these techniques at Hunter College. I learned how to make liquid photo emulsions, and how to use non-silver processes such as gum printing, collotypes, and cyanotypes. I was driven to know all these languages of light and darkness. By 1995, when I started to teach printmaking at the Art Students League, all of my work concentrated on combining photography with printmaking.

The Concept of Abstraction

In 1992 I asked George McClancy, a painter and professor at SUNY Empire State College in Manhattan, to introduce me to the artist Vincent Longo, a professor at CUNY Hunter College. I had heard of professor Longo while inquiring about graduate schools, and I wanted to print for him so that I would learn about his work and improve my own. I became his master printer for the next nine years. I sometimes printed for Vinnie at the Hunter College printmaking studio, but mostly I printed at my own studio. Vincent Longo, a reputed abstract expressionist painter and printmaker first known for his outstanding woodcuts, had studied with the painter Max Beckmann and with Louis Schanker, a tremendously influential printmaker who was at the center of the New York ìwoodcut revivalî of the late 1940s. Vincent Longo's art, wit, intelligence, everlasting presence in our artworld and utter continuous talent will probably outlive most of us. Both Vincent Longo and Mark Feldstein were my mentors during my time at Hunter College, where I earned an MFA and briefly taught photo etching and experiments in graphics.

Printing for Vincent Longo opened my world to pure abstraction. I went numerous times to his studio in SoHo to bring some prints and see his latest paintings. His recurring theme of the circle in the square, the grids, the flat layering of colors so that light would glow from within the painting, the search for simplicity through elaborate processes, and his observation of pervasive designs everywhere in nature were of great inspiration to me, and still are.

My interest has gravitated back to gender and sexuality. In recent years, in the Passages Series and Naked Man in the Woods I portray the metaphors and passages of our being and in the Eros Series the sexual and emotional intimacy between men and women. In my work I am after the temporal, vulnerable, and random nature of our being, which is defined by gender. I, the artist, am also the voyeur. In a way, I recreate the subject in a spatial and multiple fragmentation with the use of multiple exposures. In my recent work I upset the stability of representation, by working with constant movement, dissolution, repetition, and multiple layers. It is as if I wished to render representation abstract.

Plurality

In the three series Maternity, Dances, and Naked Man in the Woods, created between 1994 and 1996, I reproduced an image many times to multiply its meaning until there was nothing left but the simple concept of being there and being gone. Both photography and printmaking permit me to multiply exposures of whole rolls of film, repeat the frames during printing, and make multiple prints of many images. Most of these images portray our sexual gender in various situations: The obvious physical reproductive powers of a woman in Maternity; the weight of a dance performed not to seduce but to reclaim a masked identity; and the grace, vulnerability and gentleness of a Naked Man in the Woods simply caressing and touching trees.

Values

In all of my subsequent work, the series Meetings, Passages, and Eros, 1996ñ2002, I seek to represent not our anatomical and sexual differences and similarities, but the values we attach to them. In the Passages Series in particular, I wanted to address the issues of fetishism and control using the visual elements of bondage, masks, ropes, and veils from a feminist viewpoint, which establishes ìa voyeur spaceî ó the distance between the voyeur and the subject seen. In the Eros Series, I tried to subvert the documentary reality of the photographic image to reveal different meanings in eroticism that a viewer can read in many ways. I think of eroticism not as a formal aspect of my work but rather as part of the process of seeing and being seen. In general, I wish to create a portrayal of the objects of our desires. Perhaps the repetition of these pictorial statements, their layering, their dissolution or their movement question and reflect on, rather than celebrate, this portrayal.

Photography and printmaking are often reduced to a means of mechanical reproduction. Nothing could be further from the truth. Each medium requires as much imagination, effort, attention, and creativity as painting, drawing, and sculpting require. A plate or a camera is nothing more than a tool, as are a tube of paint, a carving knife, or a paintbrush. We may, however, question its authenticity (original versus copy) and its mechanical rather than manual reproduction.

Printing editions of my work is a very low priority, which sets me apart from other printmakers. I am however interested in the concept of reproducing visual images in a grid pattern by photographic processes that transform the object of the image into an idea rather than the object itself. I am also interested in the repetition of a pictorial statement that works toward abstracting a figure to the point of transforming it into a concept. In the Windows and Maternity series, as in the Dances and Naked Man in the Woods series, I was not concerned with one particular image but with all of them. I used the convention of the grid as a film sequence without references to time and space. The images on each frame of the grid have their own separate story, framed and reduced in size by the whole of the grid. I used the grid as a map through time but without order, as our memory and our emotions exist without conscious order.

Conclusion

I make a distinction between authenticity and value. I believe that the artistic process of creating a print or a photograph possesses all the criteria that make a work of art authentic. Making reproductions of the first print might affect its monetary value, but not its artistic value. Reproducing an image does not diminish its presence or its impact, although the choice of reproduction might affect its quality.