This image was the starting point for the “Wanderer” suite. I wanted to print over a reflective surface, so I started drawing on a piece of gold metallic matboard that I had in the studio. I did not know then that this road would take over a year to travel.
Now, with all five prints in hand, this is still a favorite. The first of many happy accidents happened the first time I tried to feed the drawing into a scanner. I hadn’t realized that the scanner would freak out about the metallic surface of the matboard. It took some tweaking, but when finally I got a scan of the drawing that was usable, there was still a sort of haze in the background. It reminded me of the plate tone that you see in a traditional etching. And, it turns out that it makes a lovely thing happen when the image is printed on paper coated with aluminum leaf. There’s an extra depth here that I owe to this “mistake.”
Take a look at the post introducing the “Wanderer” series to understand what I mean when I say that this image is printed on paper prepared with aluminum leaf using an archival all black digital printing process. The short video in that post explains better than words can.
