Paul Kleinman enters the darkroom

I've known Paul for just about five years, not long as things go.  He's an upriver neighbor of mine if you stretch it a little, in the Hudson River Valley north of New York.  I didn't know it at first, but he's an old friend of the great etching teacher at Manhattan Graphics, Vijay Kumar.  Occasionally Paul would come around and show me his ink drawings, landscapes mostly, long lonely lines of dim trees and shadowed hills under a deft touch.  They had a sparse poetry, so unlike the grinning, affable man I knew; I liked them enormously. 

To return the favor, I invited him one day into the darkroom to play with photo paper and light.  After trying first this and then that, he began to settle on a halting, inky language of blurred signs, which I took as another way of expressing the loss and longing (if that's fair) implicit in his spare landscapes, another of his voices.  Here are a couple of pictures from that day; whatever their genesis, for me they deliver a nice shot of glassprint charm and tag.

Kleinman, Glassprint, 2010

Kleinman, Glassprint, 2010