License to Print
Etchings and other techniques
The Houses.
In other stories, I have talked of Stephen Brophy’s paintings. Of houses and landscapes and other subjects. Occasionally I’ve thrown in a print, perhaps an etching of a vintage auto or a lithograph of a hay farm. That’s because the subjects of Steve’s paintings are mirrored in his prints.
But unlike paintings that evolved over time, most of the prints were made in a compressed, madly productive two-year period, 1981–82.
Prints can’t be made as spontaneously as paintings. You can’t cart around a 200-pound printing press to make etchings in the backyard of a house you’re renovating. Or bathe a plate in an acid bath while gazing at a landscape. Or engrave a drawing on a resistant metal surface while peering at a cityscape from an apartment rooftop.
Instead, printed works on paper are the result of meticulous, step-by-step processes, involving the preparation of metal or lucite plates, chemical baths, waxy grounds and viscous inks. These etched or engraved, inked-up plates are sent with dampened paper through hand-cranked presses, transferring ink to paper. It’s both messy and exacting work.
Experimentation.
At some point, Steve joined a guild of artists working in the Catskill region of upstate New York. The artists pooled resources to make prints together and turned work requiring extreme patience and skill into a more social experience. I don’t know much more about them, or why Steve stopped making prints when he did.
Each printmaking medium — etching, drypoint, lithography, serigraphy, woodblock printing — provides a quality unique to itself, but can bend to artist trial and error. Steve experimented. He interchanged black and sepia inks, colored inks and different colored papers. These ranged in success — with most people drawn to the more traditional black or sepia on white.
But see for yourself. Do you like the colored version? To be honest, these odder prints are growing on me. I like the restless spirit of the artist behind them.
The Animals.
I’m surprised that animals don’t show up more prominently in Steve’s work. He lived with and loved his pets more than anyone I knew. When I came into his life, he still had his donkey Molly, who was tethered to a big metal wheel and roamed around the yard. According to his older kids, the “house with the donkey” was all you had to say to friends who wanted to know where you lived.
At one time he had, in addition to Molly, chickens, goats, cats and dogs.
And Steve was never without his dogs. He was partial to huskies, but frankly it didn’t matter. Barney and Lacy. Kayla. Katie, then Blue, with Cory. Mogli and Ziva. He created elaborate rituals around feeding them, giving them treats, sharing his own food with them. He’d tell me that he had to go into the kitchen now because the dogs were expecting their cookies. Their cookies?
Not sure about the bears. From a visit to the zoo?
I’d like to end with how Steve taught our son Eli, while still in high school, to make etchings. Now a pretty wonderful draftsman and illustrator, Eli then was a neophyte who was game to learn a new skill. The first one is of Jake and Eli’s yellow lab Cory and the other of Steve’s house and studio, facing toward the street. Artists begin by working with other artists. You work at it and then slowly you get your chops, your ideas, your craft — and something starts.
This story of Steve’s prints is about an intensely productive two years in the early eighties. But teaching his son brought out one final eruption of his own printmaking, in 2009. Loose, gestural, powerful — Steve showed he still had the right stuff; he was free to be who he was until he decided he was done.
