Sight Lines I: Tracking Shot

I am finishing up my latest image and hope to have it done by January. It will be the first of three in a new series of 23" x 36” etchings, which as a set will be called Sight Lines. I am calling the first image Tracking Shot after the filming technique of tracking alongside the subject of a scene while being filmed.

I have been exploring the digital realm to assist in the intricate procedures I have had to develop for my last two series of prints. The making of my collage/etching/engraving pieces has become so complex that I have often found myself feeling hostage to the actual process of execution. Often my greatest motivation for a new piece is the prospect of solving difficult aspects of the previous piece; and the obvious solution of simplifying myself out of the hostage predicament must defer to the reality that elaboration is what I do best, what I want to do and where I still find the most profound satisfaction. Another barrier to simplification is the amount I must spend on each individual print of the edition on the deficiencies of the final printing itself. This can take up to three hours for each print and I am hoping the digital help can relieve me—and my printer—of some of this irksome demand.

To my delight the Adobe software to which I turned, was surprisingly close to the invention of layers, transparent sheets and imported references I had devised for my Henry James piece, The Jolly Corner Suite back in l970. Who knew? And it is turning out that Photoshop, with the fabled fiendishness of its learning curve, was actually created for the mind-set of a wily, ruthless strategist like me all along and I am having an unexpected romp in the park.

(I am deliberately burying the memories of groans and shrieks that were all to be heard emerging from my studio for weeks on end.)

I must confess that my worst adversary remains the computer itself, whose intimidating depths of esoterica, of importing/exporting, its totally irresponsible willingness to bloody crash and its empathy-challenged indifference to just anything involving me just finding things, remain so stubbornly elusive to a septuagenarian brain, it is a mystery to me how I could ever have taken to the Adobe program with such sang froid.

I am not entirely displeased with the speed and sense of completeness with which I was able to find the magical qualities emerging from this new way of working. I do hope you will agree. Actually all that has changed is the revision of the collage part of the work. The rest remains the same. The media will still be gelatin-gravure etching and engraving. The size will be 23” x 36”. The edition size will remain 140. Though anyone who would like to discuss the edition size issue will find my mind open to any suggestions.

A few of the Sources

1. Two opposing interior views of the St Paul’s cathedral in London.
2. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan—with an impudent reshaping of the passages to enlarge the dome.
3. The running dog, café scene and medallions—which are other quotes from that same 2006 Galleria print Continuum.
4. A film shoot of a 1926 Lillian Gish film, The Scarlet Letter.
5. Gish’s Swedish director, Victor Seastrom, who much later played the aging man in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. Bergman died during the course of my working this image out.
6. Mexican girls running from a wind storm.
7. The two conversing men—both James Joyce. The older, much-feted Joyce of the post-Ulysses Paris years, is arguing with a younger Trieste Joyce, who is still trying to work the tangle of his Ulysses novel out. This vignette is a hidden reference to the 2004 Bloomsday festival in Dublin where I saw a private viewing of a 2004 Ulysses film (Bloom), and have been mentally arguing with Sean Walsh, the director, about the Nausicca scene ever since.
8. An umbrella from a Beatles poster and a rather startled dog from the dog album of Elliot Erwitt, the same source as for the Continuum dog, whom I had turned into Cerberus, guard dog of the underworld.

There is no narrative or allegorical program to the image. It is a Magus-like moment and place suggesting import but eluding explanation. Much has been done to suggest that my true subject may be that which is not there at all. All smoke and mirrors. The sheer ebullient space of the space itself.

Peter Milton