Edgar Hartley's ceremonies of chemigram magic

Hartley, The Warding, on Adorama FB, 2018

If you see a very tall gentleman striding down West 40th Street in Manhattan whispering mantras to himself in an Asiatic language, possibly a dead one, it's most certainly Edgar Hartley, known also as Upasaka Bodhisattva, absently preparing himself for a day's work in the darkroom.  When I first knew him this was not on the program: he was mainly concerned then with the devising of warding sigils, amulets and protective seals for the summoning and healing of spirits - a specialized occupation to be sure - but in recent years he has transitioned smoothly into printmaking and cameraless photography.  Are the two related, wards and prints?  In his hands they most certainly are.  In fact you probably can't truly appreciate the accomplishment of his new show, Grinding Iron Rods Into Needles, at Manhattan Graphics, February 1 to February 28, without seeing how they inform and interpenetrate one another.  I'll let you explore those connections on your own since I admit my scant knowledge of the magick arts, yes that's a 'k', my loss to be certain.  Come to the opening reception Saturday, February 16 to meet the artist and discuss your sigils with the Bodhisattva himself.

For those unfamiliar with Tang dynasty chengyu, or idioms, it's helpful for starters to shed light on the show's title.  The story goes that one day in the 9th century young Li Bai encountered an old woman by a stream.  She was beating an iron rod between two stones.  What are you doing, Li Bai asked.  I'm beating this iron rod into a needle.  Let me try, he said, and he tried for a minute or two and gave up, saying this is crazy.  No it's not, the woman said.  If you keep doing it again and again, you will eventually have a needle, it's all about perseverance.  Li Bai left her and thought about this, and later would become the greatest poet in the history of China.

So much for background.  Let's turn to the work and see what we can learn from it.

Hartley, Chronos, on Ilford Warmtone FB, 2018

On Chronos, pictured here, Edgar has used several resists that have become popular of late (cf. our post last month on soft resists) including guava paste and oil spray.  Soluvar by Liquitex was the hard resist, and he used varying amounts of stabilizer, or ammonium thiocyanate, on this and all the other darkroom pieces in the show.  I suspect he may have dampened the warmtone here with a bit of selenium, judging from the sober quality of the red, although he's mum on that.  For The Warding at the top, Soluvar and tape were the resists (no guavas there) but the major difference lies in his use of bleach-etch methods, a newer tool in his box, to soften the surface and give it a suitably sensuous effect.

Hartley, Shi Tou, on Ilford Warmtone FB, 2018

Hartley, Untitled, on Fomatone Classic 132 Mat MG VC FB, 2018

Hartley, Your Phenomena Is Not My Phenomena II, on Adorama FB GL, 2018

To create the Fomatone image the artist used both brush and tape, although the dominant gestures arise clearly from bleach-etch, as they do also in Your Phenomena, where the hard resists, MSA Varnish by Golden and Soluvar by Liquitex, are barely perceptible however past the veils of floating emulsion.

As Edgar tends to work on small format paper, for a show like this, where most of the pictures are 16 x 20 inch C-prints, hi-resolution scanning can play an important role in how things get viewed and loved by the public.  David at Print Space, West 21st Street, stepped in and scanned the originals at 1600 dpi and some even as high as 2400 dpi, and then did all the printing on Kodak Endura.  You won't want to miss seeing the results.

It's only fair to add that this show includes an assortment of other printmaking endeavors by the Bodhisattva: paper litho, collagraphy, photogravure, etching, even silkscreen.  But you know why we aren't talking about them.  His website is www.edgarhartley.com.

Young Li Bai and the Old Woman

Resistive notes (2) - to shake or not to shake

Ah, that is the question.  Many emerging chemigramists have written to ask me, when I lay my photo paper in a tray of developer or fixer, do I agitate it there, in its 10 mm or so of liquid, or do I let it rest?  Does it even matter?  Let's approach this question by thinking about it for a moment.

It seems clear that a motion tangential to the surface of the paper (and of the liquid too, if not deep) will produce a shear stress acting on the paper in a manner to dislodge anything clinging there, if given enough time and enough agitation.  Now, to review, chemigram materials resident on the paper might include (1) hard resists, like varnish, (2) soft resists, like syrup, or (3) quite inviscid and nonadhesive fluids like the fixer or developer themselves, for example, or other household chemical agents that may be chosen for suspected properties.  But their rapid dislodgement is not always desirable; it really depends on the effect we seek.  In the case of inviscid, free-flowing fluid, we are usually quite content just to dip and pull, securing the signature mark of the enveloping chemical and moving on to other things.  But just for the record we show, in figure 1, what a shear stress might yield in such an evanescent situation, from one of my own works from 2009.  It's rather hard to reproduce, this effect, requiring a certain lightning-quick flick of the wrist, since the viscosity coefficient of waterlike materials is so small - so don't attempt this if you discourage easily.  Just think about it as a possibility.

figure 1

 

The choices and our ability to profit from them are more varied as we move up the rheology scale to tougher resists.  Some workers may favor a slow progressive erosion of the bonds between paper and resist, others may like it faster.  The difference between the two can be seen in the width of the resultant Mackie lines.  Testing this, we performed a simple experiment three times during the first week of November, using Ilford RC paper, somewhat impure Kodak developer and fixer (but normal for chemigrams), Golden MSA varnish, and common x-acto incisions, to compare a paper that received monitored agitation with one that was left unattended in the tray.  The time to withdrawal was twenty minutes, by which time the effects were amply demonstrated. 

figure 2a, agitated

We illustrate this by one of the runs - they were all similar - shown in figure 2a (with agitation) and 2b (stationary).  When we enlarge them and apply a scale (not shown in this post), we find a Mackie expansion of 10 mm in the stationary case vs 14 mm in the agitated one, a 40% increase that remains significant even if the crudeness of our measurements is discounted.

We can compute a velocity, for those who care, of 4.2 x 10 (exp -2) m/hr.  Not much, but not zero either.

figure 2b, stationary

At this rate, the Mackie line would circle the earth at the equator in a runtime of 3 x 10 (exp 8) hours, or 34,224 years, give or take.  So shaking the paper seems a good way to get where you want to go.  Patience helps too.

Warm tone, cold tone

Collins, 072510CH-1, 2010

Collins, 072510CH-9, 2010

I'm not going to be systematic here, but simply want to illustrate what some of the options are. The two examples above were printed together, in a single run, in Dektol developer, acid stop bath, and acid fixer (ammonium thiosulfate) with hardener, choices that were somewhat random because that's what I had in the darkroom that day. In general you don't want hardener (alum) in your fixer, and you may want to try an alkali fixer with or without an acid stop bath. So be it. We started with Dektol at 1:7, although concentrations aren't always important in a chemigramic process as contamination occurs routinely and may even be encouraged, depending on technique. The paper on the bottom is Adorama FB warmtone, the one on the top Ilford MGIV RC. No toners were used. Between these two papers, tonal contrast is immediate and vivid.

We could have attempted to modify our results further by fiddling with developer ingredients such as accelerators and restrainers, but that would have meant separating the trips the papers made down the printing pathway - no big deal, but not what we intended. Sodium carbonate, an accelerator, might have been invoked to bring a colder tone to the Ilford, or sodium or potassium hydroxide for that matter, while a restrainer like potassium bromide or even table salt could have brought warmer colors to the Adorama. If we had used a developer like Ethol LPD, which produces cool tones at high concentration (1:1) and warm tones at dilution (1:7), further pushes in corresponding directions could have been expected.

The resist used in both cases is Golden MSA (mineral spirit acrylic) picture varnish, diluted 1:1 in mineral spirits.