CapeFearPress.com
Title
Cape Fear Press
Description
I received a BFA in Printmaking at East Carolina University in 1989. I moved to New York City in 1990 and worked at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop until 1993. While there, I set up their defunct photo print facility to continue making my own photo etchings. Soon I began assisting many other artists in making photo etching plates, the old fashioned way- KPR. This left me doing too much of the dirty work while they did the re-working of the plates and printing and left me exposed to more toxins than if I had just been doing my own work. The situation forced me to seek less toxic alternatives to KPR. I turned to pre-sensitized plates for a while and I liked the non-toxic processing but didn't like the one shot chance with exposure or the high cost. I contacted Mitsubishi about the resist that coated those plates and of course they said the formula was a secret, but they did suggest I try the photopolymer films made for circuit boards. In 1991 I obtained a roll of pink colored PCB photopolymer and began experimenting with this film. I was also making plates for a print shop in SOHO that made prints for Robert Motherwell, Peter Max, Richard Prince, Tom Wesselman and others. I tried this film for Motherwell's plates and it worked great for his bold, graphic images. However, with the more detailed drawings or halftoned images by the other artists, the film was too thick to yield a high res etchable resist. Lamination of the film was tricky too. The master printer required all their plates to be etched and steel faced for consistent editions to be printed so an etchable resist was necessary. Since my own technical and aesthetic preference for my prints was to etch and re-work the plates, I abandoned further testng of that resist and went back to KPR for the time being.
I moved back to Norh Carolina in 1993 and began to try copper-gelatine photogravure, the ultimate photo etching medium. It had all the advantages I was looking for, almost no toxicity, high resolution image quality and a metal plate that can be re-worked afterward with scraping, burnishing, aquatint, engraving, etc. The method is painstakingly tedious and temperamental. I still felt there was something simpler without overly compromising the results.
Since then, there have been major improvements in photopolymer film resolution. I believe the recent demand for digital technology and the need for computer circuits to be increasingly smaller has led to this product's current development. How suiting since it is now being used for digital prints by artists.
Contact
- Cape Fear Press
-
- carolina beach NC
- United States 28428
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- 910-458-4647
