The Short Answer

Monotypes are one-of-a-kind printed paintings. Gail begins making her images by laying out oil-based pigments (usually etching inks) onto a smooth, hard, non-absorbent surface. Then she manipulates the paints, creating textures and complexities of color, moving and removing the paints with various tools. Next, the image is transferred to 100% rag paper with a press. Since no permanent change was made to the plate, it cannot hold the image. Transferring it once largely erases the paint from the plate, making the resultant image on paper a unique original. MONO-type. In Gail’s case, the process doesn’t stop there. Once the monotype has dried, she usually works into it with a variety of media, including watercolor, pencil, pen and ink, pastel, collage and oil pastel.

Why? Monotypes are more spontaneous than paintings on canvas, which suits an important facet of Gail’s temperament. Since the plate doesn’t hold any of the paint, you can make the image by taking away the paint as well as by adding it, you can texture it differently from a canvas, and you can take advantage of the varying viscosities of different colors to create overlays and complexities of color unique to the medium. Finally, it is a medium that allows an enormous range of technique, procedure and expression. There are a lot of people who do good work in monotypes, but no one whose work looks like Gail’s.

The Long Answer

Monotype is a very old and a very young medium. Artists at least as far back as Castiglione and Rembrandt made them, but they regarded the images they made as “sketches,” not finished works of art. Not until Edgar Degas (1834-1917) did an artist explore the medium seriously, and even he was attracted by its spontaneous character. He would cover a plate with ink, then “sketch” the image (usually a young dancer) by removing the pigment with a tool. His monotypes were predominantly linear, though he used the inks somewhat for molding and tonality.

After his death, monotypes returned to limbo. Museum curators and art dealers didn’t know what to do with them, so they didn’t want them: they’re printed so they’re not paintings, but they’re one-of-a-kind so they’re not prints. Perhaps it was just this ambiguity and outsider status that attracted artists like Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Nathan Oliveira, Adolph Gottleib and Willem de Kooning. In any case, following the publication of Eugenia Parry Janis’s book, Degas Monotypes, in 1968, and the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition The Painterly Print, painters (not print-makers) began to try their hand with monotypes. By the late 1980s when Gail discovered the medium, monotypes were well (if not widely) established in the art world.

Although in recent years manufacturers and some artists have experimented with water-based inks, the traditional material (and what Gail uses) is oil-based. Lithographic inks, etching inks and oil—all of which can be used to make a monotype—are all made by grinding colored pigments into a binding agent derived from linseed oil. What differentiates the three materials are (a) the fineness of the particles of pigment (i.e., the length of time they’re ground) which affects the intensity or saturation of color and the viscosity of the material, and (b) the way the linseed oil is processed. (a) Etching inks (which are what Gail mainly uses) are ground the least, about an hour, so the particles are the largest. This imparts a body to the pigments which makes them harder to wipe away, harder to smooth out the brayer marks, and more intense in color. (b) Both kinds of inks heat the oil to 300 degrees Celsius for an extended and different length of time, driving off the more volatile fractions which would cause deterioration in the paper over time. Monotypes made with etching and lithographic inks (as Gail’s are) are archival.

The paper is acid-free, 100% rag paper from France. Gail uses Arches Rives exclusively, mainly the cold-pressed Arches Cover. Occasionally she will use the hot-press Arches 88 (which has a smooth surface and is printed dry). Colored papers she uses are either Arches Black, Arches Cover Buff or Arches Rives Gray.

The plates can be any smooth, hard, non-absorbent surface. Although she has used everything from glass to zinc to cutting boards to virgin computer boards, the vast majority of Gail’s monotypes are made from Plexiglas or acetate plates. These have the advantage of being transparent, lightweight and relatively durable.

The press is an etching press made by Takach Press Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bed of the press is 63” long and 34” wide, and from one end of its run to another it covers more than 10 feet. The press stands almost 4 feet high and weighs over 1,200 pounds. We’ve moved it once.

Suggestions for further reading:
Kurt Wisneski. Monotype/Monoprint: History and Techniques. Ithaca, NY: Bullbrier Press, 1995.

Julia Ayres. Monotype: Mediums and Methods for Painterly Printmaking. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1991.