In printmaking, ‘registering’ an image means making a clean print: if it’s made with several plates they all have to line up perfectly; if it’s just one plate there must be no surplus ink or slippage. An image that has stayed with me for years is that of Norman Ackroyd RA bent over his magnifying glass, checking the registration of etchings at the Royal Academy Summer Show; if they weren’t perfect they were rejected. No wonder there was so much dull printmaking at the Summer Show, so many perfectly registered pictures of cats. The sad thing is, my reader will probably be thinking ‘and what’s so wrong with that?’ Well, I’ll tell you.
The craft of art is only the beginning; any artist, from Ronald Searle to Pablo Picasso, from Paula Rego to Lee Krasner, will tell you that without something to say, without a sense of wonder and visual excitement, an artist is only a craftsman. I have nothing against craftsmanship but the fact is that the crafts of painting, sculpture or printmaking are, to a large extent redundant, developed for different circumstances, and only have any relevance now to very specific things.
What I mean is this: rather than pretending that it’s a voyage of discovery and you don’t know where you’ll end up, why not just employ the available technology to go straight to it? For example, if you want a lovely picture of a cat, in black and white, in nice grainy lines that build up a tonal drawing, why not, instead of going to a printmaking studio and learning how to do soft-ground etching, just do a drawing, scan it in to your computer, apply the necessary filters and so on using an appropriate program and then print it on thick paper? Much easier, far less messy (etching ink is more or less impossible to remove from your fingers) and cheaper by far. You could even just run a photograph through the program to get the effect you want. No need to draw then, either – if a lovely picture of a cat is what you want.
I have a similar argument about portraiture from photographs. I was so disappointed to learn that a recent winner of the BP Portrait Award had used this technique. Its implications are that what is really valued about the portrait is not the image but the canvas, that what gives a portrait value is that it’s made with high status materials. This cheapens both disciplines – the implication is that a photograph is not good enough, it’s only when it has been painstakingly copied onto expensive canvas that it means anything.
The first thing users of this technique say is ‘well, artists used to paint from their drawings’; the second is ‘at least I took the photograph’. Both statements are inauthentic; a photograph is not selective about what it shows you, it shows everything, whereas you have to make the choice if you are drawing – it’s your pencil, your eye. And so what if you took the photograph? If I’d taken the photograph from that angle with that camera it would have looked more or less the same. Not true of drawing.