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>... With POP, the actual exposure process is truly interactice
> because self-masking produces differential contrast--the longer you
> expose the slower the progress of the shadows, while the highlights
> continue to gain density at a much greater rate. Printing by inspection
> as self-masking proceeds is about as interactive as you can get :-) .
Actually, not.... I wouldn't in fact call fine tuning a print through
testing and tweaking and judgements and the making of the many choices you
describe "interactive" ... I wouldn't even consider POP, where you can
watch progress and affect it by length of exposure, "interactive" in the
sense I meant -- though I'm not making semantic decrees... Of course any
response to results would be "interactive" in the broadest sense.
But when I say "interactive," I mean in the sense that a painting is
interactive. That is, Picasso stares at the work *in progress* for an
hour, then makes some changes, perhaps drastic changes. Then he considers
what it looks like now, and makes changes to the changes, or based on the
changes, and considers those effects and works from them, and so on,
cumulatively.
In painting, even when there is a pre-vision, it is almost always modified
by the actual work in progress. Often painters don't know -- and don't
want to know -- what will happen until they see it evolve. Stories about
painters taking works back from collectors, or off the walls of a show, to
work on some more are legion. Albert Pinkham Ryder kept noodling on his
-- for years, decades even.
A recent Art in America had an article on a work in progress by Elizabeth
Murray... showing the quite dramatic changes as she interpreted and
re-interpreted the 3-dimensional support built from her model. The
assistant who had built this "canvas" hinted that he liked the unadorned
plain "sculpture" best, and judging from the photos I tend to agree, but
that's another issue. The essay was an absorbing account of how a painter
found her vision by looking and painting interactively, cumulatively
....on one work. Many painters (if not most) work this way.
Likewise in gum printing, at least my own. Perhaps it's lack of
imagination, or lack of confidence, or lack of control, or whatever, but I
begin with an idea, then respond to what actually occurs, making the next
coat accordingly. Results may or may not be a surprise, and feel "right."
Then they are in turn modified and so forth. In other words, all kinds of
changes, some quite drastic, as well as lighter or darker, tone of shadows
and highlights, the various modifications you mention, occur interactively
from looking at one print, and feeling or finding your way.
I recently, as it happens, returned to the studio after an interval of
nearly a year, picked up a "finished" print, decided it was too dark and
too purple, and added a thin coat of pale yellow to all but the central
figures... something unpredicted, unpredictable, and amazing happened....
I could never have "pre-visualized" it.
Needless to say, it helps if you have some idea of what causes what and
how to get such and such to happen. Flailing in the dark is likely to be
just .... flailing in the dark. But in my experience a gum print is
usually built by responding to the work in progress. (Most particularly in
multiple coat gum -- the interaction is less in single coat gum, although
it still exists). As I see it, what you describe is fine tuning, or even
broad tuning, but not the sense in which I would use the term
"interactive."
Judy