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> From: Richard Sullivan <richsul@roadrunner.com>
> Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 03:19:21 -0600
> Subject: Mystical Gum formula
Jack Macdonald's AKA W. Mortonsen's gum formula was
3 parts Gum Arabic
1 part egg white
1 part Lepages mucilage
1 part Knox gelatin
My notes don't say but I believe the gum was 14 Baume and the gelatin
was 1 pkg to a quart of water. MacDonald used the yolks to make egg
tempera to paint with, he raved about the qualities of egg tempera
paints. As I recall he changed his gum formula around a lot mostly
upping or lowering the amount of gum. I had seen him throw it together
like a chef doing a marinara, almost any ratio of olive oil, tomato, and
garlic will make a passable sauce. He'd throw it together without
measuring, just eyeballing.
MacDonald was most definitely a flawed genius, though at times I though
of him as an imperfect maniac. He tried to market a kit called Platna
Print that was nothing more than a Kallitype kit, though all the
literature lead you to think it was platinum. It gave the "quality
sought in a true platinum print" etc. Despite this he was an undending
wellspring of Alt-Photo Lore, push one of his buttons and he could go on
and on about some process. I got the impression that there was something
of a cult of secrecy within Mortonsen's circle. W.M. did not publish in
book form much of his processes ( at least I have not seen published
accounts, though I could be wrong, I've no claim to be an expert at
this) but charged his students big money to learn them, the students
then were lead to think that they possesd the secret mantras of art
photography and they could not reveal them. I'm sure there are those
here on the list that could illuminate this issue more fully than I
could, maybe a real live W.M. student out there?
A little more MacDonald trivia. Jack MacDonald had a portfolio of maybe
a hundred prints that he used to show a PSA photo shows to advertise his
school in Inglewood Ca. I was always amazed that the work he showed was
far superior in technique and content to what he did at his place. I
had noticed that his portfolio prints were trimmed to the print on one
mat, rematted and signed on the new mat. That is the print was raised
up on a second mat. In his portfolio were several dozen Metalchromes, a
process that Mortonsen excelled at, a selective toning of a print using
exotic metals to where it almost looked like a color print, very
exacting and tedious. Jack one night in the darkroom after a half dozen
beers (an old boys thing) he told me that when Mortonsen died, his wife
asked him to catalog Mortonsen's personal collection.
I'm curious if any other list folks have had connection with Jack
MacDonald in the past and what ever became of him.
Dick
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Dick Sullivan
Bostick & Sullivan
Santa Fe, New mexico