First Impression – The Two-Color Miracle, A New Etching by William Steiger
William Steiger is a painter with a hands-on approach to printmaking. For his recent etching, “The Mill” (2004), he established strict technical limitations for himself: the full-color etching was to be printed using only two colors—vemillion and blue, from only two plates. Working closely with Kathy Kuehn and the other printers at Pace Editions, Steiger used a combination or soft-ground etching and aquatint. He established the image's basic combination with the etching, then used a stepped acquatint process to create the solid areas of color. Isolated parts of the plate were etched for different lengths of time so that when the two plates were printed on top of one another—wet ink on top of wet ink—the colors mixed to create a range of seductive hues, including bright red, orange, various shades of brown, near black, and tones between royal blue and violet.
The technical facts are simple—two colors, two plates—and complement the austerity of the architectural subject: a structure that, in its clarity of form, has a Shaker-like presence. Steiger deliberately left out details in order to emphasize the images's formal qualities. The right edge of the main building, for example, is implied by the relationships between shapes and colors and exists only in the mind of the viewer. It is this penchant for abstraction and sense of color, combined with matter-of-fact technique and subject that lends this print an unexpected magic.
