COME IN AND TAKE A LOOK AT MY ETCHINGS
Today I visited the Asheville Art Museum to which I have a membership. I hadn’t been there in a while and today there was a new small exhibit of etchings from centuries past. I’ve never paid much attention to etchings. They are almost always small and in black and white and appear to be mechanical in some way, unlike paintings that are often large and brightly colored showcasing the painter’s personal style.
Many of these etching artists were also painters including the two that I paid most attention to, James Abbott McNeill Whistler famous for his painting, Whistler’s Mother and Mary Cassatt, who exibited with the French Impressionalists.
I especially like Mary Cassatt’s paintings of women and children and was surprise to learn that although she loved children she was unmarried and childless and put her art ahead of motherhood. I think this etching of a mother and child is beautiful. But perhaps it touches me simply because it is a mother and child. Children, on Hallmark cards and elsewhere, always having a sentimental power.
Knowing very little about etchings I wondered why Mary Cassatt would make an etching in black and white rather than painting in color with all of the detail that she puts into her paintings. Scratching through the waxed copper plate and then putting the whole thing into acid where the acid would eat out the copper where the wax had been scratched away in the reverse of how the finished etching will appear, seems like a very difficult process and much harder to control than painting.
The only advantage this would seem to have to me is that once the plate was finished hundreds, even thousands, of copies could be made. A painting then could only be one copy. Yet today with modern methods of reproducing and printing a print are so refined that a print can be made that looks exactly like the original.
But until recently the only way to make multiple copies of a drawing was through etchings which could also be used when printing illustrations in books on a printing press.
You can tell that I am getting in over my head here. After all this comes from one visit to a etching exhibit and thinking about it for twenty minutes.
But to get in still deeper, I’ve noticed that in the last ten years or so that painters at fairs sell their original painting for a very high price while also selling almost indistinguishable prints for a modest price, allowing them to sell their painting again and again.
And then to get in still deeper now people are making paintings,NFT’s, on the computer itself. There is no actual original, every copy is exactly the same, pixel by pixel, with the original. But some kind of marker is put on the original so that it can be sold at a high price with the exactly identical copies being sold at a lower price.
With etchings the original is actually the copper plate with all the prints being copies, but since the printed copy is what matters there is no original. I think a certain number of an etching are printed and numbered and then the plate is destroyed. I would assume that if 100 are printed then that gives the copies a certain rarity and elevates the price, while if thousands are printed the value of each is lower.
At this point I continue to get more and more confused, feeling that I in in Alice In Wonderland. The etching is just as beautiful if there are ten copies or ten thousand. Why should the effect on the buyer be greater if there are ten than ten thousand? Why, even, when they look the same should an original painting have much greater value than the exact replica printed copy when you can’t tell the difference by looking at them? And why in the world should an NFT, a purely digital painting with a marker on it be worth much, much more than the exact same non marked copy which could be produced in sufficient numbers that everyone who has a computer screen could have a copy and enjoy it. Do you only enjoys something because no one else can have it?
The etching by Mary Cassatt is likely extremely valuable. But I had to look at it quickly before my hour ran out at the parking garage and so could only glance at it, while I can get just as much of an impact from it on my iPad screen sitting here at home looking at it as often and as long as I want while sitting down comfortably and drinking a cup of coffee, and so can you.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 