Dennis Hollingsworth

Monotyping at Cirrus

I pointed at this particlar feature as Francesco, Lino and I were bent over the papers. We sorted them into piles of color and character. My question: "How can we do this again?" The guys were avid. They liked the problem. "This was a second or third pass." "You put mineral spirits on it." "This is a second inking and there's a ghost." (A previous pass of ink color/form that's fading but still present on the drum.)

We set to work.

I stablized variables relating to orientation: everything moves horizontally, ambidexturaly (is this a word?). We woud be in an experimentalist mode, a little bit of a goofy mood, ojete territory for sure. With each pull, we would study the result, forensic notes for the next attempt. Accident and deliberate intention following one after the other in rapid succession.

A good day.

Lino cracked: "Un gran coctel de pulpo." ( A big cotopus cocktail.) We messed about with French marbling, McGyvering a water table and floating ink, picking it up on paper, instead of impressing, or flattening, or rolling and squishing... it was like capturing spide webs, like catching butterfles in a net.

Print people love to study the dynamics of ink on paper. Connoisseurs at a granular scale. I would keep moving and the guys would say "Whoa, look at that!" "Check this out." "I've never seen that before." Maybe, it is the usual business of the priint world to repeat and iterate in fidelity to artist's intentions. Printer's proofs and master reference standards rule. But today, it was wild weasel time. They were having fun of another sort and I enjoyed the circumstance that they too were enjoying themselves along the way.

Momentum rolled as we kept catching glimpses of beautiful kismet all about -on the drum, off the taped boundaries of the steel bed, even on the back of the paper as the medium soaked through. I kept asking: "How can we get this onto the paper?" So we kept inventing other forms of printing -blotting paper directly off the bed by hand, blotting off other wet sheets, printing off the rollers as we spritzed it with mineral spirits and water.