From: Jack Brubaker (jack@jackbrubaker.com)
Date: 03/01/03-01:05:25 PM Z
In responce to the request to identify lurking gum printers I respond
belatedly do to loosing the power cord to my laptop for a week.
I have never been comfortable with the term "gumist". I began gum printing
in the 60's and read the old sources I could find at Indiana University at
that time. It seems to me that the early users of the gumist term were
printers trying to claim they were more of an artist than other printers
because they used the gum process whether they had any content to print of
not. A few years later the term was used a lot by the refomers who wanted to
trivialize the gum printers. I know its a loosing battle to fight the use of
a word already in use. It takes a much larger movement that I am prepared to
mount to make such a change (the feminists managed to change a lot of
vocabulary but it took years). But for the record I make gum prints I'm not
a gumist. To me gumists are the fad printers of the turn of the century who
jumped on the bandwagon and gave the process a bad name.
I've never found a color that clearly caused the process to fail chemically.
There have been many coatings that have failed. But in each case there was
always some other probable cause. I'll admit to printing with gum in part
because I like the lack of absolute rules. There is almost always some way
in which some odd method or material can work. That incredable flexability
has (in my opinion) led to the many working methods used by different
printers, and secondarily to the differences of opinion on spicific
techniques.
Vive la differance! It is great to hear from so many with so many ways of
working. It is wonderful to be knocked off ballance by new twists to things
we have done for a while and begun to believe in...
Jack Brubaker
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