Fixing

If you’re not making a mistake, it’s a mistake. 

---Miles Davis

I was working with Master Printer James Reed in his printmaking shop, Milestone Graphics in Bridgeport CT, making monoprints when I encountered a problem that seemed to be a “mistake.”

My imagery, part of my Casa Blanca series, consisted of a personal reverie— a classical Venus figure, a billboard ad, and a ‘56 Chevrolet. About halfway through the session, I gave Jim one of the plates on which to roll a color and then asked him to remove some ink from a designated area, an area that was going to be the color of the light paper, the eventual location of the Venus figure. After he rolled the red and printed the sheet, we noticed that he had made a mistake. He had not removed the ink from a small triangular section, a section that was supposed to stay light. The middle value red color of the roll remained, and it appeared to be a “mistake.” 

The ink removal would have allowed the light of the paper to serve as a white area, not a red area. The red area remained a distraction and looked wrong. To solve the problem Jim began to mix up some light ink and was going to try to cover the mistake by printing over a light color. That was not a good idea. I knew that trying to cover dark areas with light color is asking for trouble; the ink will always be somewhat transparent, and the spot will always be visible.

“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t spend any more time and energy trying to ‘fix’ the ‘mistake.’ What we need here is a darker color over the light area, a color that is an equivalent value to the red spot. That way we will never notice the spot because the ground surrounding it will be a similar value.”  “What color?” he asked. “Try a burnt umber and sienna admixture.” 

Jim mixed and rolled a dark burnt sienna color over another plate. I decided on that color because the dark burnt sienna was similar in value to the red “mistake.” Once we printed the sheet I no longer had a light Venus figure, I now had introduced a dark Venus figure. Additional hand coloring adding the dark burnt sienna color on the lettering helped to balance the print.

Rather than fussing with the “mistake,” I added the “mistake” color in the field, thereby integrating the “mistake” into a larger field. The visual relationships shifted, and the viewer’s awareness moved off the “mistake.”

“I never try to spend too much time trying to fix so-called mistakes,” I said, “I regard ‘mistakes’ as opportunities to find ways to add more of them.”

NOTES

For more about Mistakes and Fixing see Studio Seeing, Chapters 1 and 14