Circular Reasoning

Creating abstract images with a printing press allows considerable flexibility. Printer’s inks and brayers are the tools chosen to create abstract images using a printing press to facilitate transfer of ink to paper. Brayers, which resemble a “rolling pin”, have a surface which can both hold and release ink for transfer to a medium that can, in turn, transfer the ink to paper, creating a print. For the background of this image, a brayer coated with green ink was lightly rolled over the surface of commercial paper embossed with circles. Light pressure was used so as to allow only the embossed areas touched the ink on the brayer. The inked paper was turned face-down on a stiff plate (in this case Plexiglas) and rolled over with a clean brayer to transfer the ink to the plate. The paper was then removed, leaving behind the embossed ink images. Gestural swatches of color were added to the plate with brayers “loaded” with varying colors of ink. When the composition was completed, all inks on the plate were simultaneously transferred to a single sheet of dampened print paper by rolling the snadwich of plate, ink and paper underneath the weighted roller of a printing press. The one-of-a-kind print that emerges is referred to as a monotype. The designation 1/1 signifies that it is a unique, one-of-a-kind image.

Sometimes, the artist may choose to pass the same inked plate, untouched, through the press a second time with a clean sheet of print paper. This faint image, known as a “ghost”, is lighter than the original because it is composed of only the residual ink from the first passage through the press.

To create a series of similar images, fresh inks from the same palette may be used on the original plate which often has ghost images. Each image produced in this manner is a monotype though elements of the theme/color/design may be shared among the separate prints.