What is creativity? What is creative drawing? How does creativity show itself in artwork, in etching? Can you see it just by looking at the print? These and other questions have troubled my mind lately. Etching and intaglio printmaking is quite technical, or even mechanical printmaking technique. Often when the first idea pops up, that seems to be the most inventive part of the work. So it seems. The latter part of the work is a series of practical methods, phases of work. You just follow the etching procedure, the same that has been available for centuries.
Is there room, in this etching routine, for creativity. I think that you can’t be creative by hassling with the etching technique - or you can, but it is not wise to try to invent a new etching method every time you make a piece. Etching is a drawing done by line. Creativity is linked to the drawing process, which is often slow and arduous.
To draw on a plate covered with hard ground is so different from drawing on paper. On paper you can adumbrate, hesitate and proceed carefully and wipe off something easily. But when you draw on an etching plate there is no room for preliminary lines or sketching. Whatever you draw is there. Polishing some lines away is not such an easy task to do. It's so painstaking that it’s better to leave everything as it comes out after the acid bath.
There is a hint of uncertainty and unpredictability intertwined to the drawing process. And that’s maybe the place where creativity thrives. You must think that there are no mistakes, but challenges and drawing situations and problems you have to solve by drawing more lines on the plate. To make an etching is a creative journey you do with lines.