Night vision
Printmaker Mary Teichman at Argos Studio/Gallery
Alow shrub sits by a fence whose indeterminate length disappears into darkness. Its branches are just visible beside a road that is dully illuminated by a single street lamp. Yellow light breaks from factory windows, revealing few details of the immediate surroundings. This street scene at night is depicted in a color etching by printmaker Mary Teichman, who has focused her practice in recent years on nighttime imagery. Qualities of mystery and intrigue are heightened when the world is plunged into shadow. Details of objects and surroundings only slowly reveal themselves as the viewer enters a dark outside from the safety and clarity of a well-lit room. It is this liminal state, when the viewer’s pupils widen to accept as much available light as possible, that Teichman captures in her prints. “I am definitely a night person, and I work best at night,” she told Pasatiempo. “They’re all about light in one form or another. If it’s daylight, then the light is also the subject.”
Argos Studio/Gallery and Santa Fe Etching Club present a comprehensive exhibit of Teichman’s prints in advance of a workshop for experienced etchers. At that workshop, Teichman teaches her process, which involves using multiple plates to achieve subtle color gradients and contrasts. “The technique I use really lends itself to night scenes, because you can get such beautiful blacks and darks. It’s all done with layering. That’s one of the things I love about the technique. Also, the light coming out of the darkness is another thing that I love and is possible to render using this technique.”
But the show, Mary Teichman, Master Intaglio Printmaker, features more than just urban night scenes. She does still lifes and landscapes as well. The latter is a genre she avoided for many years. “My parents were both landscape painters,” she said. “I didn’t think I could do a landscape while my parents were still alive, because that was their territory.” Some years after their deaths, she gave landscapes a try. “The first landscape I’ve ever done was maybe three years ago. My husband and I were on vacation on Cape Cod, and we happened to be staying at this place that Edward Hopper had painted. Walking around the sand dunes around there, I really felt like I was inside a Hopper painting. I was inspired by this. There’s a print called Ryder House, Truro. That was my first landscape.”
The print Ryder House, Truro (After Hopper) is in the exhibition. It’s a daytime scene, and the foreground of the Cape’s tall marsh grasses is largely obscured by shadow, rendering the landscape ambiguous. Like many of her etchings, it’s a painterly composition, resembling a watercolor. “I started out as a painter in college and didn’t know I was going to get so interested in printmaking,” she said. “All the processes I use are intaglio processes. I use line etching, soft ground, and a lot of aquatint. The aquatint gives them that watercolor look. You grind up tree-sap rosin into a fine powder, sprinkle it on the plate, and melt it so
that there are little blobs of rosin dust. When you immerse it in acid, the acid etches in between all the little blobs of melted rosin, which are very fine.”
Teichman was born in New Jersey and moved to New York City to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in the 1970s. She remained in the city for 17 years before moving to western Massachusetts 25 years ago, where she set up her studio in an old converted factory building. The factories in her vicinity, especially as they appear at night, are what inspire many of her images, far removed from the processes used to create them. “Most of what I’ve done since I moved to western Mass are these factories at night.”
Intaglio prints can involve drawing with an etching needle and then submerging the plate into an acid bath that fixes the lines in the plate. The etched, recessed lines hold the ink before the print is pulled. Using multiple plates to create a layered image allows for a broad range of coloring and detailed scenes. “It’s sort of like solving a puzzle,” she said. “The overlapping and the interplay of the different plates have to fit together. That puzzle part of it has always drawn me. There’s definitely the element of surprise, which is the engaging thing about the technique. I’ve been doing this for a really long time, so I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to get, but it’s one thing to see something in your mind, and it’s an entirely different thing to really see it.” Teichman can be working for weeks before she gains a real sense of how a finished print will look, unlike with painting, which is potentially more immediate.
Teichman’s prints, in part because of the traditional process, have an old-fashioned quality, although the imagery is often contemporary. One exception in the show is Ex Libris, a still-life depicting blue glass bottles arranged on a bookshelf holding classic titles such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Thumbtacked to the shelf is a page from an illuminated manuscript. “I always say I was born 300 years too late,” Teichman said. “I love the old look. Traditional etching is not being taught — not even in art schools. Certainly not as much as it used to be.”
Argos is one of few organizations devoted to etching and the only studio/gallery of its kind in Santa Fe. Early printmaking, because editions could number in the hundreds, made high art available to the masses. Now, more than five centuries on, etchings are less common due to a growing scarcity of practitioners. “They’re becoming more rare, these old processes,” Teichman said, “and that’s why I want to teach them: to keep them alive.”