New chemigrams from Australia (signed MH)

Higgins, Untitled 377-4, 16x20", 2014

Matt Higgins (see March 2013 post here) is a man who inhabits his darkroom trays the way a monk inhabits his monastery or a lighthouse keeper his lighthouse.  He never leaves.  If he does he may miss something, an insight or a vision.  A chemigram, he knows, is a process based only provisionally on a plan; once set in motion it must be allowed to grow on its own, like a child, to hatch surprises that one is never quite prepared for, to show off marvels that you won't want to miss.  He calls the darkroom 'my playground.'  He almost apologizes when he has to dash to the airport to see off a girlfriend - no time to waste here.

He works with hard resists, not soft: after all he's Australian and don't they wrestle with crocodiles?  Epoxy enamel is his favorite hard resist.  He flashes the paper briefly, then rolls on the enamel, letting it dry overnight.  In the morning he'll attack the paper with what he calls a scalpel, a tribute to the surgery required for deep art.  He has pre-dulled the blade by running it over concrete, for if it's too sharp it will cut right through enamel, emulsion, paper and make a hash of everything.

Ilford is his paper of choice though he finds Kentmere equally good, and he's also been experimenting with older papers, some of which give him a greater tonal range because they take longer to develop.  He uses mainly RC versions but fiber based paper is not overlooked, as with Untitled 197-3 below, done by using a varnish similar to Golden MSA and letting the varnish harden, then crunching up the paper in a ball, flattening it and immersing it in developer until a satisfactory pattern emerges.  It's helpful to have a heat press handy to give it a final pressing after a fix and wash.

Higgins, Untitled 197-3, 11x14", 2014

Matt works two papers at a time, taking them down the trays at a rate which allows him to concentrate on one while the other soaks.  Working under safelight, as an area is revealed beneath the resist he'll flash it with his phone to get a good black, then move on.  Areas meant to be white aren't flashed.  The pictures are all unique; he does not edition them.  As for chemistry, he goes by the book: Ilford Multigrade at 1:9 dilution, Ilford non-hardening fixer at 1:4, both at 20 degrees celsius.  He likes his stop bath a little warmer to help soften the paint.

If the bulk of his current work is black-and-white and shades of grey, that doesn't stop him from engaging in some freer dipping and dunking occasionally to achieve the classic gamut of chemigram colors.  He does these like star turns.  Here's one that uses nail polish, out of the Cordier playbook, with lights on and short residence times in both fixer and developer:

Higgins, Untitled 256-3, 11x14", 2014

One of the recent pieces I like best is this one, where Matt's skill with scalpel is in the service of a sensuously muscular concept:

Higgins, Untitled 254-5, 20x24", 2014

Here's another, this one done last year, a truly bravura display of mastery.

Higgins, Untitled 178-4, 16x20", 2013

At one point in his writings he recites the litany of the chemigram darkroom like this: 'Developer, water, fixer, water, touch, push, tease, feel, developer, water, fixer, water, touch, push, tease, feel.  On it goes until I'm hungry and have to face the world outside again.'  His obsession makes us feel totally privileged.

He'll be part of a team from the Australian National University to host an art summer school at Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina, USA, June 7th-19th, 2015, with Prof. Denise Ferris and others.  If interested contact Matt directly at matt.higgins@anu.edu.au.

Chemigrams in Prague and Brooklyn

Collins, Colorchart, 2012

If you were in Prague this fall and found yourself along the embankment called Smetanovo Nabrezi near the Charles Bridge, you could have taken a moment to drop in to the Hollar Gallery to see the New York printmakers show, which ran from Sept 18 to Oct 13 2013.  One of the works on display was a chemigram, Colorchart (2012) by Douglas Collins.  While there are many different ways to make a chemigram, this work is a good place to start in trying to understand some of the standard chemigram methods and strategems, as least as practiced by myself, a few but not all of my colleagues, and a number of my students.

The pictoral space here is organized as a grid, for simplicity - not a requirement but that's just how I often work.  My goal was to generate a random sequence of colors by allowing the chemistry in my trays, fixer and developer, to chip away at the tiny silver halide grains in the emulsion, changing the ways these grains refract light and thus selecting for certain wavelengths.  Since I knew we were going to generate an array of colors (geeky is good, but for a refresher look up the Mie effect on your own: it would take us too far afield in this post), what better way to think of it than as a color chart?  We're half way done.

The photographic paper I chose was Ilford FB warmtone and I coated it with MSA varnish by Golden - undiluted in this case, although dilutions are certainly permitted and can lead to different results.  (Actually everything is permitted but that too is another, quite wonderful, story.)  Once dry I incised in it a set of boxes, using a small blade, taking care not to go through the paper and prematurely end with tatters.  These boxes would become my color swatches in the finished work.

Next I proceeded with the 'dance of the trays', passing the prepared paper from developer to fixer to wash and back again - and again and again.  Did I say that all this can be done in daylight?  The basic chemigram method does not demand darkness, it's only in hybrid practices involving stencils, drawings or photo negatives that you may need to work under safelight, or in pursuing solarization effects or other variants; Christina Z. Anderson's book is a useful review of these methods.

After a certain time, when you start to think you screwed up and nothing's going to happen, things do happen.  Bits of varnish start to lift, at corners usually.  After a few minutes more will lift.  You can intervene here with a pair of tweezers and pull the rest off - or you can leave it to desquamate on its own.  If you decide to let the sections of varnish shed by themselves you will soon receive a bonus: the loose ends of varnish, flopping around on their tethers, generate a wispy color of their own, a kind of imprint of their brief existence.  That accounts for the strange outlines around some of the boxes in Colorchart and adds to the overall character of the work, a lyricism maybe, I'm trying to be modest.

Finally, when you feel the colors are right you plunge the paper, not without trepidation, into fixer for a last time, but be attentive here because the fixer may squelch everything, all the vibrancy you thought you had: some bypass this step and go directly to a long wash.  (See the post on Jeff Robinson, January 2011.)  Then you dry and you're done.

Nikolova, untitled, 2013

A very different way to make chemigrams is by using the so-called soft resists, materials that disintegrate or lift off almost immediately.  Eva Nikolova makes surprising use of some of them found in the local delis of her uptown Manhattan neighborhood, and in doing so has extended the expressivity of chemigrams in unforeseen directions.  "I draw," she says, "mostly with peanut butter and guava paste (a Dominican favorite), using pieces of mat board and credit cards, alongside the customary sticks and Q-tips.  The guava paste behaves exactly like honey except it has a stiff granular texture and doesn't spread, so it's easy to control.  What you are seeing is just the interplay of simple additive and subtractive drawing transformed by the chemical process."

I have to stop here: this is too astonishing.  To build the ruined cities that continue to haunt her, these fragments torn from dreams - go see the rest of her work on her website - with the most humble and ruined of tools gives the whole enterprise an unexpected pathos.  It is consummately eloquent.  It makes one think of Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons or maybe one's own nightmares, and yet it's a chemigram.

Piranesi, from Imaginary Prisons, 1761

Eva is showing some of her new work at the New York Foundation for the Arts, 20 Jay St, Dumbo, Brooklyn, until Jan 17 2014.