About Puretch

background and philosophy

I received a BFA in Printmaking at East Carolina University in 1989. I moved to New York City in 1990 and worked at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop until 1993. While there, I set up their defunct photo print facility to continue making my own photo etchings. Soon I began assisting many other artists in making photo etching plates, the old fashioned way- KPR. This left me doing too much of the dirty work while they did the re-working of the plates and printing and left me exposed to more toxins than if I had just been doing my own work. The situation forced me to seek less toxic alternatives to KPR. I turned to pre-sensitized plates for a while and I liked the non-toxic processing but didn't like the one shot chance with exposure or the high cost. I contacted Mitsubishi about the resist that coated those plates and of course they said the formula was a secret, but they did suggest I try the photopolymer films made for circuit boards. In 1991 I obtained a roll of pink colored PCB photopolymer and began experimenting with this film. I was also making plates for a print shop in SOHO that made prints for Robert Motherwell, Peter Max, Richard Prince, Tom Wesselman and others. I tried this film for Motherwell's plates and it worked great for his bold, graphic images. However, with the more detailed drawings or halftoned images by the other artists, the film was too thick to yield a high res etchable resist. Lamination of the film was tricky too. The master printer required all their plates to be etched and steel faced for consistent editions to be printed so an etchable resist was necessary. Since my own technical and aesthetic preference for my prints was to etch and re-work the plates, I abandoned further testng of that resist and went back to KPR for the time being.

I moved back to Norh Carolina in 1993 and began to try copper-gelatine photogravure, the ultimate photo etching medium. It had all the advantages I was looking for, almost no toxicity, high resolution image quality and a metal plate that can be re-worked afterward with scraping, burnishing, aquatint, engraving, etc. The method is painstakingly tedious and temperamental. I still felt there was something simpler without overly compromising the results.

Since then, there have been major improvements in photopolymer film resolution. I believe the recent demand for digital technology and the need for computer circuits to be increasingly smaller has led to this product's current development. How suiting since it is now being used for digital prints by artists.

In 1999 I got my first computer (a Mac) and first peeked into the internet. I found that other artists were now selling photopolymer and had methods for laminating the film by hand. I tried both films and they were great for non-etch intaglio but neither was thin enough to my liking for etching. The thicker of the two films had to be pre-thinned with the developer, an extra step I found to be a hinderance. This timely step exposes the raw film to oxygen during thinning and drying, degrading the sensitivity of the resist, and yielding inconsistent results. Consistency is crucial to photo processes.

In 2000 I began testing a much thinner film designed for high resolution etching. While adapting the proven industrial techniques for processing this film, throwing in some innovations of my own, and borrowing some as well, after numerous tests, I came up with a dependable method for using this film. Puretch met and exceeded all of the requirements I had been looking for in a resist for traditional photo etching. In 2001 I started Cape Fear Press and made Puretch availabe to artists and others.

I have also used and tested most all the types of resists available; solvent based liquid resists and their developers, pre-sensitized plates, liquid polymer resist (the liquid solvent version of the dry film) and a variety of dry polymer films. I was just about to test a water based liquid polymer resist when it was recently discontinued because it did not work well in a high volume industrial setting. Too bad. Both of the other liquid resists yielded toxic fumes and health hazards. Besides being virtually non-toxic, the dry films have an added advantage over the liquids in that the film thickness will be perfectly consistent with each application.

I would like to thank all my customers, especially the ones who provide valuable feedback and questions. There are so many variables in each studio that I cannot test them all and the Puretch process must be able to adapt to almost every unique situation. I enjoy answering your questions and they challenge me to innovate and solve problems. Based on your feedback and my own observations, I am routinely fine tuning the processing directions for Puretch.

I believe that printmaking techniques are more alchemy than science and one can master them by doing, observing and feeling.

Jennifer Page, Cape Fear Press

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