Scratch out a living. Scratch that off your list. Scratch the surface. Scratch and sniff.  Scratch that itch. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Kratz mir in tuchas.  (For those of you who don’t understand the last one, it has something to do with “scratch” and “my ass.”) 

Where is all this going?

I used to make a pretty good living.  Then I moved to Santa Fe where that’s sort of an impossible dream (unless you’re a really good waiter).  But I’m about to start over from scratch.  Literally.  I’m going to start etching (not to be confused with kvetching).  And etching leads to printmaking.  (Unless things don’t go well with the acid bath.  Then etching leads to a visit to the burn unit.)

How did all this come about?  I was chatting with a yoga classmate in a sauna one day when she mentioned that she was a printmaker at a gallery in Santa Fe.  I told her I drew pictures.  I showed her a few on my website when we got out of the sauna and she suggested that I come to the gallery and show my work to the gallery owner.  She also invited me to see her in action and I happily went. I’m always on the lookout for new things to learn.

Leslie does beautiful, complex drawings and is painstaking in her work.  I didn’t see her do the drawing, the etching or the acid part.  By the time I came to see her in action, I saw the actual printmaking part.  It was very messy, physically strenuous and took a lot longer than I thought it should have.  Leslie told me it didn’t have to be that messy or drawn-out.  It was just the way she did it.  I’d never have the patience.

Nevertheless, I am on the verge of studying with the man who owns the gallery.  If he wants me to spend the next six months poring over the works of Albrecht Durer, I probably won’t make it.  But, if he gives me a piece of copper and tells me to start scratching away (which is how I draw, anyway), I might get into it.  I did it once before, decades ago.  Art was my second major, after all.  And I’m kind of a jazz artist.  I draw what I’m feeling at that moment. 

Why make prints of my drawings?  Leslie tells me I can sell more of my work that way. I asked her how many prints she has sold and she told me that she sold some but that very few people buy drawings.  I think she makes prints mostly because she loves the painstaking process of printmaking.  It’s meditative for her.  Plus, she does interesting, thought-provoking work.

Back in elementary school, I sold lots of drawings.  There was a boy named Thomas Singer who loved my work.  He used to buy drawings from me for a dollar apiece.  He also used to spend a lot of time sitting under the piano for bad behavior.  What a thing to do to an art patron.

At any rate, I always drew, even in my earliest days.  That was how I expressed myself before I began to write.  Now, I do both because I can’t express myself enough.  I’m an expression junkie.

And I have sold or given away quite a few of my recent drawings.  Most of them are black and white – they are pen and ink drawings, after all – but some of them are shaded with colored pencils.  It’s nice to have a little variety. 

The gallery owner wants to see all of my original artwork.  I believe he will want me to etch a copy of an existing piece onto copper.  And he has already cautioned me that color and bold lines don’t lend themselves well to the printmaking process.  I’m going to request that he just allow me to scratch out a spontaneous image – something that nobody (including me) has ever seen before.  Raw stuff.  My kind of stuff. 

So, I ran into Leslie in the sauna again the other day.  I told her I needed to come up with a new blog for May and didn’t know what to write about. 

“Write about printmaking,” she said.

I wonder whatever became of Thomas Singer.