Florence: Drawing and Printing Everything
Summer 2005
I drew constantly. On benches, on church steps, on the low walls along the Arno. I drew tourists who didn’t know they were being drawn. I drew buildings from imagination and then looked up and compared. I filled notebooks — not sketchbooks with nice paper and careful compositions, but notebooks, the kind you burn through when you’re not worried about making something good. You’re just making. Line after line, page after page, until your hand knows the shape of a Florentine roofline without your brain getting involved.
I drew from life. I drew from memory. I sat in piazzas and watched people and put them on paper and didn’t care if it was accurate because the act of looking that hard was the point. I sketched the samurai armor and Japanese art at the Oriental Museum in Venice — stuff I hadn’t expected to find in Italy — and it cracked something open. The precision of the lacework on the armor, the economy of the ink paintings. I made pieces from those sketches for months afterward.
But I wasn’t there just to draw. I was there for printmaking.
The studio became my second home. Intaglio — etching into copper plates, working the lines with a needle, biting them in acid, inking and wiping and running them through the press. The physicality of it matched the city. Florence is a place built by hands, and printmaking is a process that lives in your hands. The resistance of the plate. The pressure of the press. The moment you peel back the paper and see what the metal gave you.
I visited Il Bisonte, one of the great printmaking studios in the world, and other shops where people were still doing this work the way it had been done for centuries. Watching a master printer ink a plate was like watching the sculptors I’d been studying all summer — the same patience, the same refusal to rush. The same belief that the process is the art, not just the product.
Everything fed everything else. I’d spend a morning at Dante’s house, standing in the rooms where the man who mapped Hell once lived, and by afternoon I’d be in the studio translating that feeling into a plate. I’d sketch the David in the morning and pull prints in the evening. The city was the source material and the studio was where I processed it.
Out of all of this I made a book. An artist’s book in comic form — intaglio prints bound together, the whole summer’s worth of experiences compressed into sequential images and text. The Bargello, the Magdalene, the David, the piazzas, the food, the heat, the cobblestones. All of it, filtered through the press.
When I got back to Wisconsin, that book won an award. It earned me scholarships. Someone bought it. I was stunned by all of that — I’d made it because I had to, because two months of Florence was too much to hold in my head and I needed to put it somewhere physical. But it turned out other people wanted to see what I’d seen. The farmboy’s version of Florence had value to someone besides the farmboy.
That summer was the most productive art-making period of my life. Not because I was talented — I was adequate, I was learning — but because I was saturated. Every day the city poured in and every night I poured it back out onto copper and paper. There was no gap between the seeing and the making. No hesitation. No wondering whether it was good enough. I just worked, and the work was honest, and for two months that was all I had to be.
I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.