>I did this by dry-mounting paper to plexiglass. It worked very well. My
question
>now is how should I separate the two without risk of ruining the print
either by
>heating or wrinkling ?
Heating should not ruin either gum or pt/pd prints, at least not at the
level to melt dry mount tissue. Use a low temp verison like Seal 4000
(2000?) well it's their paperless archive stuff. To remove it from the
substrate all that you need to do is put in the press until it gets to the
melting point and take it out and quickly lift up a corner and peel off. If
it doesn't come off in one pull, then redo the section that is left on. It
sounds tricky but it is easy. After it is off, it will have a plastic like
coating on the back side and will no longer act like real paper. I used the
Seal 4000 mounting system and trimed and remounted the print to another
piece of paper. You can use on of those fancy uppity British papers with
deckles and watermarks. Some of my students would use a piece of plastic of
the right thickness and make a platemark in the paper by running it through
an etching press and then drymount the image in the platemark, in that way
the edges of the print were flush with the paper. You can then put it in a
standard mat. Real snooty I'd say!
I was studying some German Pictorialist gums that Stephen White had in his
gallery about 15 years ago, they were large, maybe 16 x 20 with multicoats
and perfect registration. They had some indications that there had been
some kind of varnish on the back side. When he wasn't looking, I wet my
finger to see if it was library paste and I concluded it wasn't. It seemed
to be solvent based. I guessed then that the artist had used something like
an alcohol based shellac to glue the paper down to a substrate and then used
alcohol to remove it. In this case it the shellac was not washed off
completely, as just enough was used to remove the print and to get most but
not all of it off. Our ancestors were not as dumb as we look.
Dick S.
Dick Sullivan
Bostick & Sullivan
1541 Center Dr.
Santa Fe, New Mexico
87505