I've spent the last weekends printing the largest format etchings I've ever made - not possible without the help of great assistants (not pictured). Here's a photo of the large Sjöström press with a 270cm long and 125cm wide sheet of Hahnemühle paper.

I then came to my senses and decided to go with a couple of 170x125cm sheets first. Over the last weeks I've also drawn, etched and shaped about 50 new plates, so the full print will have over 100 plates. They look best when printed chine-collé, which means that a thin sheet of Asian paper is placed over the plate. In the printing process this thin paper then gets glued to the big Hahnemühle sheet. Easy to do when the plates are rectangular, a little more time consuming when the plates are oddly shaped, like mine. 
Here's a photo of how 100+ plates with 100+ little sheets of of paper look like:



After all the little pieces of paper have glue on their back and are placed over their copper plate, I arrange everything on the press bed, the dampened Hahnemühle paper gets placed over it, and after it's gone through the press, the final result is this:

Picture quality is terrible, apologies for that. But anyway, a sneak preview of the prints I will show in the FAFA location of this year's Kuvan Kevät. Make sure to stop by and take a look!

Ode to Joy!
I spent the last weeks writing my thesis and working on the small copper plates. It's a lot more fun now that the sun is out. The following picture shows my studio table with a lot of already etched copper plates that are cut into shapes. On the left side of the image you can see a small piece of the plate that I am currently drawing on, and on the right side of the image are my two favourite etching needles, well sharpened:





I'll have to take a break for the next two days, going to Tampere to print / work in the studio of Tuula Lehtinen. Then I'll be back in Helsinki on the weekend - two more days of drawing and I'll be ready to etch the plates, then cut them into shape. More updates are soon to come!

Here's a close up view of the plates - after I cut them to shape I usually sand the edges a little, so that they don't cut into the felts when printing:




04.04.2013
Patrick Wagner / www.nymphomation.de

My work for the spring exhibition will be a very large print, to bring my series of "Graveyard Prints" to a proper conclusion.

So strange to think that I started this project almost two years ago, researching the prints of the "Little Masters", a group of German printmakers from Nürnberg, living around 1500 to 1550.
They were the generation after Dürer, and centered around the brothers Barthel and Sebald Beham this group got famous for two things - their wonderful, small format engravings, most of them not bigger than 4x6cm, and their court trials which earned them their second nickname: "The Godless Painters" - in the wake of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses their openly displayed disbelief and general lack of respect for the city authorities wasn't well recieved, and so they were exiled from Nürnberg in 1525 for heresy, and again in 1528 for plagiarizing Dürer's study on the anatomy of horses.

Combining my fascination with their delicate, small plates + my love of the Totentanz, the Dance of Death eventually led to the Graveyard Prints as they are up to now - very small plates, around 1,5x3cm each, printed in groups on heavy paper, with love.



My Graveyard Prints are not medieval, nor are they performing a danse macabre. By now they might not even show graves anymore - small skeletons in coloured shapes, remniscent of this and that, permeated with a sense of humor - that, the humor, the lightheartedness I have taken from the medievals, then added my passion for Chinese and Japanese paper - all prints are printed chine collé, often more than one. The detail above shows a plate printed in black with two layers of thin paper (the yellow one is Japanese, the green paper is from Indonesia).

Anyway, I'm writing too much.
The plan is to create three prints. The paper is 125cm high and 270cm wide - space for quite a lot of these small plates. In fact, all that I ever etched.

And a bit of Danse can't hurt, macabre or not.

19.03.2013
Patrick Wagner / www.nymphomation.de