For my last semester I wanted to take an art class because I had always considered myself an artist even though design slowly devolved into everything but art at one point. I’m currently in printmaking, which I thought about dropping 2 or 3 times.
I’ve learned three printmaking techniques so far, each one being more tedious than the last. Most recently, aquatint, requires cleaning and degreasing a copper plate (1 hour), covering it in a resin dust and baking it for 400 degrees (1 hour), covering it in multiple rounds of hard ground to protect the plate and dipping it in acid so it could bite grooves into the virgin plate (2.5 hours), before finally printing, which requires covering it in ink, cleaning it off in a heated stove, and putting it in a press (.5 hours). It’s a lot of waiting and has a high accuracy of error. You could put too much or too little, wait too long or too little, or even do things out of order (which I did).
What was the point of wasting my Saturday afternoons to sit and think of nothing at the studio. There was a reason why everything was digital, why no one even bought physically printed things anymore. What’s the point of putting hours into something that you can’t even predict? What’s the difference between this 5 hour print and something from the copy machine?
Every class I had taken in college to that point was pretty pragmatic and was immediately validating. You pass the test cases or you don’t. Everything I did was also pretty pragmatic. I planned all my homework on my gcal and I immediately went to office hours if I couldn’t get the answer. I was pretty good at talking about feasibility and MVPs and a/b testing. I didn’t reply to people on Tinder because it “wasn’t the right time” because I had to focus on recruiting and then by the time that ended it had been six months (it was never the right time). Even though printmaking was abnormally slow, I forgot what slowness and tediousness was like.
Perhaps I was allergic to slowness because the entire world spun quickly. In a class I took, there was some thesis about how trains made the world go too fast and too blurry for people which was why floral baroque fonts disappeared and in its place came Futura. And now the world turns ever faster, with automations and AI becoming the promise of a future where thought becomes synonymous with reality. I should get the “coolest” job as fast as possible. I should “change the world” as fast as possible. I shouldn’t dream of the life I want to live, because I should be living it right now.
Everyone told me to drop the art class and I couldn’t figure out why I was still in it for a while. Maybe I like how illogical it is. How slow and messy and how the outcome really doesn’t feel worth it. A while ago, when I was going through it, my friend told me all I could do was bide my time. I had to wait for the oven to heat up, I had to wait for the hard ground to dry, I had to wait for the acid to bite through the copper, I had to wait for the ink to be scrubbed off so I could finally see what mattered.
random updates:
I went to a pliny exhibit and it was very cool turns out ithaca had this pseudo barter economy thing until 20 years (ago?) and it reminded me of a rlly good scene from lady bird
trying to take a chill senior spring but idk what to drop which is why I’m still in printmaking but maybe it’s not that deep
my skin has gotten better because I put a heap of cerave on it everyday