In an artist’s studio in Port Hope, Ont., Janita Wiersma pulls a piece of paper off an inked copper printing plate to reveal the eye-catching image of a blue flatfish with a red belly. It’s an original David Blackwood. Well, not exactly.
Blackwood, the printmaker known for intricate images inspired by the tough history and dramatic tales of his native Newfoundland, died in 2022, and is now the subject of a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. For 10 years, Wiersma worked alongside him as his studio assistant, prepping plates, inks and acid baths. Today she manages his archive.
Blackwood left so many usable plates behind that Wiersma can reproduce the multistep process for visitors to the studio, about two hours east of Toronto. But she can’t make a new David Blackwood. There won’t be any posthumous prints of mummers, sealers or schooners.
At the studio, Wiersma reproduces Blackwood’s printing process for visitors.
“The idea of the original print is that the artist’s hand is in every step,” Wiersma said, explaining that Blackwood always pulled his own prints, never leaving the job to her or an outside master printer. “David used to say it was like music. The plate was sheet music and a different musician would play it differently than the composer.”
Because of the artist’s full involvement in every one of about a dozen steps, Blackwood’s work provides a good opportunity to explain that a fine art print is an original work that exists as a multiple; it is not a mechanical reproduction of a painting. Confusion reigns in a market in which every grocery store and charity fundraiser seems to be auctioning what is really only a signed poster as though it is an important work of art. Rising above this crowd, Blackwood’s printmaking is the real deal.
David Blackwood in his studio on Nov. 7, 2000.Peter Tym/The Globe and Mail
Born and raised in Wesleyville on the northeast coast of Newfoundland, Blackwood moved to Toronto in 1959 as young man to attend what was then the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University), and remained in the province because he found a dealer and teaching opportunities. After working at Trinity College School in Port Hope he eventually settled in the town in 1973, but returned regularly to Newfoundland, eventually building a summer studio there.
Although the 1960s was an era when abstraction held sway, Blackwood was a figurative artist. He quickly settled on printmaking as his medium and storytelling as his method.
“I don’t know which came first – was it the subject matter or was it the medium that allowed him to express it? – but he found it,” said Alexa Greist, the AGO curator who is organizing the retrospective exhibition. “It wasn’t popular to do narrative work at that time, and he did not waver.”
It was with copperplate etching and aquatint effects that he found the fine lines and shaded tones suited to the mournful stories of lost boats, heroic rescues and mighty whales. Some Newfoundlanders might have preferred not to remember hard times, but the images delighted comfortable urban Canadians. Blackwood relied on his own memories and family stories, often depicting events that happened before he was born in 1941.
The process of making these images, as Wiersma explains it, is complicated and requires significant technical skill.
As Blackwood’s studio assistant, Wiersma prepped plates, inks and acid baths.J0HAN HALLBERG-CAMPBELL/The Globe and Mail
First, a drawing is copied onto tracing paper so it can be reversed, while a copperplate is coated with a wax that will resist the acid etching bath. The image is transferred onto the plate through the tracing paper with pencil; those lines are cut into the surface with a needle. Then, the plate is etched in an acid bath that deepens the lines. Next, ink is applied to the entire surface and then wiped away; ink remains in the etched lines. Finally, a sheet of paper is laid over the plate and a first proof is pulled using a press with a heavy roller.
“You can leave it there, or you can proceed to aquatint,” Wiersma said. “This is one of the things David did as an artist extremely well.”
Aquatint adds detail and tone to the final image but it’s a potentially random effect that can be tricky to control. A powdered rosin – the name for the hardened tree resin of the kind violinists apply to their bows – that will resist the acid is scattered over the plate before it’s etched again, creating a mottled or shaded tone for the background. The plate is then cleaned of the rosin, inked again and printed on the press.
Adding aquatint adds depth to the image but relies on fine judgment as to how much to apply: The 18th-century Spanish artist Francisco Goya was known as a master of the technique, and a print of his still hangs in Blackwood’s studio.
“It’s tedious, yes, but the sort of tedious I really love and so did David Blackwood,” Wiersma said. “All the precise steps were of interest.”
Not surprisingly, many artists can’t master the techniques Blackwood used, or don’t have the time. Instead, they turn to a master printer.
Blackwood relied on his own memories and family stories for his prints, often depicting events that happened before he was born in 1941.
“Rubens was not pulling his own prints, you know,” Greist said, noting the historical precedents for the specialized print workshops that emerged in the United States in the 1960s. “It’s wonderful because it can allow an artist to work in a medium that they haven’t spent years and years studying.” She points to South African William Kentridge and American Robert Rauschenberg as artists who have relied on master printers. Inuit prints are also usually pulled by master printers, rather than the artists themselves.
In Europe, on the other hand, there was less tradition of handing over the printing process. Under that influence, and led by printmaker Albert Dumouchel, Quebec artists such as Yves Gaucher and Betty Goodwin mastered printmaking.
Blackwood couldn’t pull prints himself for a period of almost two years, from 2013 to 2015, when he was hospitalized with a series of health problems. During his convalescence, he began to draw and etch again, and Wiersma proofed the results (including the flatfish image). As soon as he was home, he was back at the printing press.
Wiersma holds the finished piece of the blue flatfish with the red belly.
Prints are usually issued in limited editions of anywhere from 10 to 100, partly as a marketing device and partly because the plates can wear down. Traditionally, once an edition is complete, the plate is defaced so it can’t be reused. Blackwood’s process was so laborious, however, he often failed to complete a full edition and never cancelled the plates. His wife, Anita, inherited a large collection of his copperplates, three of which will be shown at the AGO.
Some artists’ estates do issue posthumous prints from uncancelled plates, but Blackwood’s process was so individual that his widow has decided the plates will never be used again. “He was a driven person,” Anita Blackwood recalled. “He had more ideas than time.”
David Blackwood: Myth & Legend opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario Oct. 14. A members preview runs Oct. 8 to 13.