double take on tricolor
Judy, yes, a tricolor print is three color layers, but the word tricoor by itself doesn't convey much information. If I had asked for the names of "tricolor" printers without specifyiing the medium of the three color layers, I might have legitimately been called to task for omitting (all) the practitioners of one type of tricolor printing. But I asked for names of "tricolor gum" printers, and I've always understood that to mean three layers of gum. A tricolor print that has two layers of gum and one layer of cyanotype is a perfectly fine type of tricolor print, but can't technically be called a "tricolor gum" print. As someone (not me first, by the way) suggested in a discussion about this confusion a year or two, "Tricolor print, gum over cyanotype" would be an accurate label, or even "Tricolor, gum over cyanotype." I liked even better what someone in the traveling portfolio (Robert Cockrell, maybe) did, which was to simply list the layers in order rather than giving it a label; that way there's no confusion at all. But as I said the other day, to call something a "tricolor gum" that only has two layers of gum in it, is to render language meaningless. At any rate, as Keith pointed out, they are different media; they look different, the instructions for how to do them are different. I do tricolor gum and my website page is about tricolor gum. As for whether CMYK all in gum is tricolor, no, it's got four color layers, :--) and besides, it also looks different from tricolor gum. It was very easy for me, going through the gum galleries in alternative photography, to pick out the tricolor gums from the gum over cyanotypes from the CMYK prints. I can't even quite articulate how they're different, but they're different. Yes, they are all color prints, but I personally don't think it's useful to lump them all together under the umbrella term "tricolor gum" and will continue to make the distinction. If nothing else, collectors and curators want to know what's in a print. Katharine
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