HERE is a wonderful series of short recordings of the etcher Norman Ackroyd, on his early life, his experiences at art school, and his use of materials.
Below is a transcript of a discovery he made when he visited the Lacourière workshops in Paris, where Pablo Picasso’s etching for his Histoire Naturelle were printed.
Below is a transcript of a discovery he made when he visited the Lacourière workshops in Paris, where Pablo Picasso’s etching for his Histoire Naturelle were printed.
Picasso would be sixty-one, I think, and set off and do this book with thirty-six animals. Each plate’s about twelve inches by eight inches. And I think one or two of the plates in that set are as good as anything he’s ever done. When you do thirty-six plates, it’s going to be patchy. I mean, they’re all good, but,some are better than others. And the bull is a good as anything he did. I’ve always envied it.
But there were very very fine lines drawn, but they weren’t needled lines, etch needle lines; they were obviously drawn with the freedom of a pen, nib, and then the aquatint on top of that, and then, scraping out in a very broad way, and then the, the sheer energy in the drawing. It’s just magic technically. It wasn’t until I actually saw that etching that I realised that you could put sugar lift on with a pen. And even a fine mapping pen, which could give you the finest of lines. And if you were technically good enough, which Lacourière was, Lacourière was the great master etcher of the twentieth century technically, and, working with Picasso, that was one of the great tandems, you know.
I got talking about the way he must have used a pen. She said, ‘Oh yes.’ She took my coffee cup out of the saucer, and she put three lumps of sugar in the saucer, and then she put a bit of water in with it until the sugar was dissolved. And then she went to a cupboard on the wall, and she pulled out a tube of gamboge watercolour, and she squeezed about half a tube in, and then she stirred it all round. And then she spat in it, which breaks the surface tension. If you, if you had enough spit in your mouth, you could use it to wash up you know. I understood exactly what she was doing. And then she mixed it up, and then she put poured some more into another clean saucer and added more water and then she got a dip in pen and she put it in and it flowed off the pen. And she said, ‘Picasso did it like that.’ And so I said, ‘How do you know?’ She said, ‘Well I used to mix it for him every morning.’ [laughs] And I thought, well you can’t say fairer than that.
I developed a way of doing it. I make up a different mixture, but I can work with very fine pen marks, as well as brushes. So you can draw with like, pen and and wash, on, straight onto the copper plate with this saturated sugar solution. And you can just draw very freely on it. Then if it doesn’t work, you just wash it off and you can dry the plate and start again. And that’s, that’s how Picasso did the Histoire Naturelle.
And I found out, it was absolutely fabulous for going out on a landscape trip, you could take a, a dozen plates in clean envelopes and you could draw in your drawing books and everything and you could bring a plate out and you could just draw on the plate, slip it back in an envelope. And then you could come back to the studio and get these plates out, and then decide that maybe one or two aren’t good enough, you can wash them off and you use them again. And then, the others, you take right through the process. I love the technique.
