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I am attracted to large, futile, and obsolete things. I love movement and transportation. I like things that people have made and placed in the world, and I like what we make that fails to remain vital and functioning over time, but lurks about in the collective memory (zeppelins, steam locomotives, etc.). The sailing shop is made to move in the world of water; it is ordered, purposeful, and directed, in a sea that is completely surrounding, overwhelming, unassimilable, and moving independently of our desires and intentions. The train is an emblem of a journey through the world. While ordinarily not as elegant as a sailing ship, a train looks like how it works. Its path and movement are tied intimately to the shape and transitions of the land. The zeppelin is an airship, floating over the world, a bit aloof, but hard to miss. I am as often inspired by what I read or listen to as by what I see. I often look back at images from old postcards and photographs, or at nineteenth-century books. I like to link myself with the tradition of etching (whose imagery has often tended toward critical commentary and weighty contemplation and sometimes toward humor and irony as well), so I seek precedents in the work of older artists for themes I approach.
I have stumbled upon less orderly and more makeshift approaches to etching. I usually begin a plate with aquatint, sprayed through stencils and developed with an airbrush and sandblaster, and then I throw in a mix of anything else available-drypoint, scraping, polishing, hardground, and white ground. Sometimes I just push around the wet ground, or add and subtract ground with my airbrush/air eraser combination with the acid bath at hand. I like to start out broad and a little uncontrolled, but with a clear geometric underpinning, and I later wrest order from the initial confusion. My images are fairly thoroughly planned in placement and composition, everything already in the right place, though I leave the marks and textures to the spontaneity of the etching process itself. I don't really want to know entirely how the image will look beforehand-too many unexpectedly pleasing things may happen to exclude ahead of time the accidental, the lucky, the improvisatory, or the momentarily inspired. But making an etching for me always involves struggle and repeated failure. Samuel Beckett said, "Fail; fail again; fail better." (I think of Degas's approach to making prints-often muddy or murky in early states, form later emerging almost miraculously.) I work in many states with a great deal of ongoing development of the plate. I rarely feel like as if I'm truly in control. Occasionally I need to take serious corrective action if things aren't heading my way - I have taken to the grinder and the plate cutter when no further advance seemed possible. The process of etching is very physical and elemental, demanding force and pressure, inviting sometimes aggression and then delicacy, conjoining fire, water, earth, and air. The etching medium had its own language, vividly present, varied, and uniquely eloquent. There is something about setting an image into metal that speaks of permanence, of duration, of undeniable presence, and perhaps my images mirror the medium in that sense.
Brian D. Cohen
January 2002
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