In 1967 I had scant awareness of what exactly a print was. My work in oil painting had been supporting my family and myself for only three or four years, and my wish was for that to continue. The director of the gallery representing my paintings was Murray Roth, and one day he said I would be a "natural" at printmaking, and that he had secured for me a commission to do five editions.

I was resistant. The whole concept was repugnant. Working with metal, acid and various other chemicals, as well as with those strange tools, seemed much too indirect. And how could I bring my visceral experience of warm paint and welcoming canvas to a world of cold copper plates and hard steel tools?

He persisted and eventually I gave in, but the commission was put on hold. I took a six week course in printmaking at the Pratt Graphic Center, when it was still on Broadway, in Greenwich Village. After that I began making etchings and dry-points. Among those who knew me, I was the only one surprised to see my disdain and aversion quickly become curiosity and pleasure. Enchanted with this additional dimension of expression I bought a small press and began printing at home on week-ends. It was magical and thrilling, and it was aggravating: I loved the prints and making the plates, but I hated the actual printing. After about a year I gave my press to a friend.

Murray was also pleased and disappointed. He liked the work and sold it, but what he had in mind was lithography. When I complained that lithography was too complicated for me to want to grapple with, he said "Nonsense! You'll pick it up in twenty minutes." Because I would have a master printer doing the printing and my only responsibility would be drawing on the stones, I agreed. It was 1968 and Murray re-secured the commission I had previously evaded. The commission called for me to work at the Bank Street Atelier where, after first observing other artists and printers for a short while, I began drawing on a stone. That moment was the small beginning of what was to become an enormous undertaking that I would pursue, with a troubling mixture of deep joy and great frustration, for twenty-three years, through over four hundred and fifty images.

The experience at Bank Street was engrossing and gave me hints of lithography's secrets, but the master printers were not really much more than apprentices with a title. One notable disaster was my being given an uneven stone, a stone thicker at one end. After two weeks of eight hour days meticulously drawing on this inappropriately selected stone, they discovered, when they went to print it, the discrepancy in thickness, and that it was unprintable. "What now?" "You'll draw it again."

After a series of some successes and some mishaps I could see the esthetic potential for my working in this medium, but I wasn't sure I wanted to struggle with what seemed the hit and miss suspense of what each work would become. If my drawing on stone looked complete and as satisfying as I could imagine, why wouldn't it faithfully print? The answer was in finding a printer who was truly a master of his craft. And, of equal consequence, who himself was not an artist quietly resentful of having to earn a living by printing for a more fortunate colleague.

At this time I was commissioned by Sylvan Cole, director of the Associated American Artists (AAA) to do two editions. Their printer was the workshop of George C. Miller & Son, and this was another important beginning in my career.

George Miller had died a few years before, and I went to print with his son, Burr. George had been the first fine art lithographer in America, in 1915, and he was widely considered to be the finest printer of black and white lithographs from stone in the world. Burr had apprenticed with his father, and he too was a devoted professional, a man of the highest standards, for whom the concept "good enough" would never do. Incidentally, it's relatively easy to learn to print a lithograph. The great dividing between the rare, gifted printer and all the others is the vast knowledge and the inventive resourcefulness that can be called upon when things go wrong, and in lithography things go wrong. That's when the master shows what he can do.

The Millers, father and son, had amassed a nice quantity of beautiful stones, all quarried from a certain section of the Bavarian Alps. This source was famous among lithograph printers for its fine blue-cast limestone, tightly grained and virtually vein free. The surfaces were inviting, even welcoming, and it was good to be working on them.

My work year soon assumed a regimen of drawing on stones at the Miller workshop, from seven-thirty in the morning until five in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, from early May until the end of August. The other eight months I painted. The workshop was in a large dingy loft. The floor was swept regularly, and that was the extent of any cleaning. For years it was just Burr, his assistant Julio, and me, day after day, mostly in silence. Light came from a large bank of windows facing north, the phone hardly rang, and when it did Burr kept the conversation business-like and terse. On occasion another artist might come in for a week or so. Sometimes a stone would arrive in a large crate from Thomas Hart Benton or Ivan Lorraine Albright. Or the elderly Louis Lozowick would appear with some zinc lithographic plates, and from time to time, the gentle, diminutive, Raphael Soyer would stop by. We would examine each other's work, and exchange opinions about various techniques, always curious and respectful.

After I had worked there seven or eight years, Burr's oldest son, Steve, came to the shop to apprentice with his father. In a few more years Burr's younger son,Terry, entered the business, and Julio, seeing he had no future as anything but an assistant, quit.

During my first years in printmaking I worked only in black and white. When I had started with etchings and dry-points I was thrilled by the deep rich blacks. In lithography my great excitement came from effects I can best describe as silvery, like ghosts of gray, grays faint yet fully drawn, with nuances that gave the appearance of images having been just breathed onto the stone, and from there with Burr's magic coaxed to the paper.

I learned to stack two by fours on either side of the stone and then lay a one-by-six plank across them.This way I could place my forearms on the plank suspended above the surface of the stone, and, resting the weight of my upper body on the plank, I could let my right wrist dangle over the edge. If I positioned myself in a certain way, I could draw just using the weight of the litho pencil. Applying no pressure, not even the effort of touching but only guiding the pencil, the tone would be applied by its own response to gravity. This allowed me to apply a faint gray blush that would lay with a blending subtlety behind subsequent stronger more deliberate strokes, and then with a graduation of more pressure, to darker and darker grays until the ultimate destination, black.

Another important bit of knowledge was learning to keep my litho pencil point extremely sharp, almost like a needle. In the course of a summer I would use two or three hundred razor blades and six or seven dozen pencils. A fresh razor could only sharpen a pencil four or five times before becoming ineffective. As it accumulated a microscopic coating of grease the blade would pull the point off the pencil when it began to taper.

The pencil sharpness was most crucial. With a very fine point I could draw further into the grain of the stone instead of just over the surface, thereby creating my own finer texture within a tone, and be liberated from the limitations of the stone's natural grain. True, the stone could be more finely grained by Burr, but then I would not have available the range of coarser textures, which kept delicacy from being monotonous.

I began looking at the lithographs of some of the masters, and from the work of Benton, Bellows and Latour I recognized the value of using the point of a razor as a tool for drawing and not just as a means to correct a slight error. Using a point and drawing, instead of scraping, the faintest lines could be incised into the pencil work on the stone. These lines would print white, and so thin that in groups, used carefully, they would just perceptibly enhance the surface with yet another subtle texture.

When printing went smoothly the experience was deeply rewarding, a sense of well-being at having brought to life a vision that could have gone wrong in so many ways, at so many moments. These times were like gifts from an unpredictable printing god, and were the events that made painful failures endurable. It was essential to know my goals could be reachable.

In a way, I wish I had stayed with what seemed to me the perfection of black and white, but as success increased, and I could afford the much greater expense of working in color, the lure was undeniable. Problems arose with color that were at first surprising, and then frustrating, after that exasperating, and finally heartbreaking. Having logged twenty-three years and hundreds of images, I had become emotionally exhausted, and I decided to quit. It was nice to once more paint through the year without breaking to make prints.

The problems with color were caused by the delicate density of my drawing. "Lithography wasn't meant to print drawings so finely and densely wrought," Burr would often say. The little irregular dots of ink perched on the tiny tops of the stone's grain need to be separated from each other by some modicum of space. You have them so close together they want to join. That joining is called 'filling in.'" But it didn't happen with black and white printing. In color printing there is a separate stone, or plate, for each color, because each color is printed separately. With each pass, as a color is added, the sheet of paper becomes more and more saturated with ink. Eventually, after six or seven colors, the stone with the key drawing, the one most meticulously drawn, needed to be over-inked to be able to print through the previous colors. At this juncture the stone starts to fill in. Then, to keep the image printable, Burr would give the stone another etch. Unfortunately this caused "dropping out," the loss of that faint gray blush I had so painstakingly laid in during the initial phase of the work. The drawing would begin to look a little bare, a little naked.

After some difficult years I asked Burr if the color inks had a different viscosity than the black. He didn't think so, but I had a hunch, and I instructed him to use black instead of inking the key stone with a dark blue or a dark green. The results were very pleasing, and the effects of the other colors were actually enhanced by removing the permeating presence of color in the key stone and replacing it with the more dramatic contrast of blacks and grays. Disappointingly, this improvement did not last long because the Environmental Protection Agency changed the rules governing the use of certain chemicals, and the black ink became as much a difficulty as the colors.

To solve these problems Miller and his sons had been urging me to draw on aluminum plates, and in 1980 I agreed. They believed this would give them greater control because they printed these plates mechanically on an ancient cylinder press. This was, in fact, an offset process, but no photography was involved. The plates were hand drawn by myself, and that was more tedious than drawing on stone, the metal being less forgiving. You couldn't use a razor blade for minor corrections, let alone use it as a technique. As color printing from stone was reaching a painfully disappointing balance between a sense of achievement and dismay, I gave the plates a try.

Again for a while there was some minimal improvement. Ultimately the problems were much the same as they were with the stones: there was no filling in, but sometimes in getting a water regulation necessary to the mechanical printing, there would occur a dropping out which would just rip the heart out of my drawings. It was so sad to see work that seemed energetic and vital become blandly attractive, denuded of depth and character. It had all become just too unrewarding for me to want to continue. But the Millers had another suggestion: drawing on mylar. Drawing on mylar, a translucent sheet of plastic, was like drawing on paper. After being drawn upon it is laid against a light-sensitized zinc litho plate in a light box, where the image is burned into the plate. It worked to perfection, except I didn't feel like I was a printmaker any more. These prints seemed to me nothing more than painstakingly-made fancy reproductions of my drawings. After three or four years I felt a little fraudulent, and I gave up lithography altogether.

Also, if I could draw so finely on a stone or a plate, then imagine the excesses of obsessing I could achieve on mylar. I was driving myself crazy. If for no other reason than this, I had to stop.

Another problem was that Burr had retired, and Steve had injured his shoulder severely enough to prevent him from ever again doing heavy work, so there was no one at the workshop to print from stone. (Terry only printed on the mechanical presses.) So while I would have gone back to black and white from stone, that alternative was not available, at least not with a Miller. There were other printers, but for a variety of reasons it was clear to me they wouldn't work out. I did try one, whose credentials and conversation indicated he could do the work. After a terrible failure, in which he ruined a stone that I had worked on for at least a hundred-and-twenty hours, he admitted he had been nervous about being up to the task, and this nervousness caused him to improperly etch the stone, burning out all the subtlety. And to compound his misrepresentation, he sheepishly confessed he had never before pulled prints on wet paper, so necessary in getting the paper's capillary action to accept even the slightest nuances of my inked image from the stone. And he was the resident master- printer for a high-profile graphic center. I'm sure there are some true masters, but I won't risk another loss in searching for one.

A while later I reacquainted myself with mezzotints.

Robert Kipniss
Ardsley-on-Hudson, New York, 2002