Passing of an Ink Icon: PiezoTone 2002 – 2012

PiezoTones are being discontinued effective March 2012. What ink remaining in inventory will be the last of its kind. The inks affected are PiezoTone WN, PiezoTone CS, PiezoTone, ST, Museum Black, Portfolio Black. We notified all current PiezoTone customers (who have purchased in the last two years) that PiezoTone is now discontinued. There is only a small amount of ink remaining and we believe PiezoTone customers may be able to sustain this ink habit for a year or two, but we believe that they should migrate to Piezography K7 which is an active and still developing ink system. Note:...Read more

Piezography ink workshop

After a gathering of printmakers at the SPE conference in March 2011, vaguely documented here - Jon Cone invited everyone to Cone Editions for a “Piezography ink workshop” or print-fest, general gathering.. as Scott King and Bill Kennedy were planning to attend an unrelated workshop in the area. With Walker a Vermonter, that left just John Dean and myself having to travel. Ultimately Scott and Bill had to cancel, but with travel plans in place Walker, John, and myself arrived at Cone Editions Thursday June 9th.   An experience like this at the receiving end of Cathy and Jon...Read more

Don Messec: Making Art Safely, Part 2

My second day of working with Don Messec of Making Art Safely (see Part 1 by clicking here) was intended to be used to determine if Piezography inks can bring anything unique to his photopolymer gravure process. But, it would also include consumption of mass quantities of smoked salmon tacos and meeting some talented and interesting friends and students of Don. Photopolymer gravure is a rather new printmaking process that combines modern UV actuated polymers with a very old tradition of photo intaglio printmaking. Gravure is a process that has traditionally meant different things to different...Read more

Don Messec: Making Art Safely, Part 1

Last week I was working with Don Messec at his amazing and healthy printmaking studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Don has dedicated the last two decades to making art safer for printmakers and artists. I am a classic example of a printmaker that had been made terribly ill from decades of chemicals, solvents and body-migrating pigments. I went cold turkey about 1993. Luckily, I had been making prints digitally since 1985 – so I had an active venue to pursue and a way to continue moving forward in a more healthy environment. Also, having recently moved to Vermont in 1988, I had access to...Read more

The Darkroom Revisited – version 2

Yesterday, I was in the darkroom with Ilford MultiGrade IV paper, Sprint Chemistry, and Piezography digital-negatives. It was fun and dark. With water running quietly, it seemed quite meditative. Perfect to pass hours. My cell phone has awesome speakers for quiet places and I eventually finished my time listening to old Alvin Ranglin produced singles. Alvin was a record producer in Jamaica in the early 1970s who laid some of the best tracks ever (another story). Life was understandably good. I was in a great darkroom. And it was nostalgic – even beyond the high school reunion I had...Read more

Gimme that old time feeling

This winter I have been shooting with a combination of plastic Diana lenses, single element optic lenses, and my prized Zeiss Distagon 21mm ƒ2.8. Shooting with a diana lens makes me feel a bit nostalgic for my photographic education. Even though I owned a Leica M5 and a decent Pentax with interchangeable lenses I had to spend my first year at Ohio University shooting with a plastic Diana camera. On the first day of intro photography we were all offered a stick of chewing gum. We used it to plug up as many light leaks as we could find by peering through the back of the camera at a strong...Read more

Piezography Gallery now Online!

This is where you can buy Piezography prints from practioners of the medium. Initially, I am starting with my own work. Soon I will expand the offerings to other Piezographers. All of the prints are produced at Cone Editions Press so that you can be assured of their authenticity. The plan is to offer different sized prints at different prices. Collectors prints will have signatures of the photographer, with unsigned prints available at lower prices. To start things off I have selected two photographs which are very close to me. One is a photograph from 1994 which is the first digital...Read more

no substitute for real world testing

There is no substitute for real world testing…like 20 feet of salt water and 3 months in the direct sun! Its been five years since the tragic devistation caused by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, many parts of Lousiana, Alabamba, Georgia and Florida that sustained terrible damage have still not been completely rebuilt. One of my customers discovered in the aftermath that prints made with Piezography Warm Neutral inks were able to sustain immersion in salt water as well as direct display under the sun! While Piezography inks are undergoing long term testing at Aardenburg Image...Read more

A Theory of Two Georges

There is the theory that a few colors can reproduce everything else, and I think of the great French painter Georges Seurat. In the latter part of the 19th century, Seurat painted dots of red, green, blue and other primary colors to recreate nature in our brain. Our eyes fill in most of the complimentary color due to the way human vision works. Pointillism in the years before the 20th century produced works such as Seurat’s The Seine and la Grande Jatte – Springtime, 1888. And actually this is how most inkjet printing is done. Dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black are printed...Read more

On new papers and coating observations

A recent comment on the popular Digital BW, The Print discussion list left me scratching my head yesterday…a little in disbelief at the responses to what seemed like a very benign observation by a monochromatic ink user. I suppose too, that I was confused how some black & white printmakers had missed the obviousness of the topic. Instead, they were conjecturing the most unusual of hypothesis to explain something that Piezography users have taken advantage of since the inception of PiezographyBW ICC in 2003. For background to this, a long time Piezography printmaker whom I believe to...Read more

On new papers and coating observations part 2

The strange thing about all this is that in 2005, Piezography Neutral K7 was released as a multi-toning ink system. But, instead of using color inks, it utilized the tone of the paper in order to arrive at a final color tone of the black & white print. It was able to achieve multi-toning through superior pigment technologies that combined to promote a pigment that utilizes light in a novel way. This is of course at the heart of the discussion that opened up on the Digital BW, The Print users list, and where I was heading to by means of explanation in part 1 of this opine. The Piezography...Read more

On new papers and coating observations part 3

The one ink that most magnifies the effect of choosing a different coating/paper in order to control final color tone is Piezography Selenium K7. This ink was introduced to be glossy compatible. While all of the other third-party ink brands have used resin as an ink base to improve glossy adhesion, we developed an alternative triple-encapsulation of polyester. By producing three actual physical encapsulations of the pigment particle, we not only produced our first glossy compatible ink, we also magnified the phenomena that befuddled several of the Digital BW, The Print users, and is the topic...Read more