Why Make a Print You Can Only Print Once? A Painting Pressed Onto Paper

Every other printing technique creates a permanent matrix that can be inked and printed repeatedly, which is the whole point of printing, whether the matrix is a carved block, a bitten plate or a stone treated chemically. This technique uses no matrix at all in that sense. The artist paints, wipes, draws and manipulates ink on an entirely smooth unmarked plate, and the pressing transfers nearly all of it to the paper, leaving too little behind to print again. There is therefore one impression rather than an edition, which puts the result closer to a drawing or painting than to a print in the usual sense and has caused arguments about how it should be classified.

The approaches differ in whether ink is added or removed:

• •The additive method, painting ink directly onto a clean plate
• •The subtractive method, covering the plate and then wiping the image out of it
• •Brushes, rags, fingers, card and rollers all used to manipulate the ink
• •Stencils and found objects laid on the plate to mask areas
• •Drawing on the back of paper laid on an inked plate, transferring the line
• •A second faint impression, called a ghost, sometimes pulled and worked over

The attraction is a combination that no other process offers. Ink on a smooth plate can be moved, wiped, thinned and rebuilt indefinitely until the moment of printing, so the working process is as free as painting, with no carving, etching or chemistry to commit to. The press then produces a quality of surface that hand application cannot, pushing ink into the paper and giving a depth and evenness that is characteristic and immediately recognisable. Reversal is part of the process, since the image prints backwards, which some artists find generative. And the impossibility of repetition removes the pressure to produce a consistent edition, which changes how the work is approached.

The results are recognisable to anybody who has seen a few, and the qualities follow from the method. Marks show the tool that made them with unusual directness, so a rag wipe, a fingerprint, a brush stroke and a comb drawn through the ink all read as exactly what they were. Edges are soft where ink was thinned and sharp where it was wiped away cleanly against a straight edge. Tone varies continuously rather than in the discrete steps that etching and screen printing produce. A faint texture from the plate surface underlies everything. And the pressure of the press flattens the paper fibres inside the plate area, leaving an impressed border that is one of the signs used to distinguish a genuine print from a reproduction.

The technique has been used since the seventeenth century and was taken seriously only intermittently. Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione produced the earliest known examples in the 1640s, working by wiping images out of a covered plate. William Blake used a related method for colour printing. The technique's major moment came in the later nineteenth century, when Edgar Degas made several hundred, frequently working over the printed impression in pastel, which produced some of the works he is best known for. Camille Pissarro and others followed. Twentieth century painters including Chagall, Matisse and Picasso used it. Its position between painting and printmaking has kept it outside the main history of both, which is the usual explanation for how little attention it receives.

Ink is painted or wiped onto a smooth unmarked plate and pressed onto paper, which transfers nearly all of it and leaves nothing to print again, so there is one impression rather than an edition. The working process is as free as painting while the press supplies a surface hand application cannot. Castiglione made the earliest known examples in the 1640s and Degas produced several hundred, frequently worked over in pastel.