BRIAN D. COHEN

“Fail; fail again; fail better.” — Samuel Beckett

Art, struggling towards grace.

I have been making prints for well over thirty years. I began to make prints because I had to; a printmaking course was part of the curriculum of the art program at The Putney School where I was hired to teach. I had taken only one etching course in college, which I enjoyed, but I had forgotten everything I had learned, dismissing printmaking as decidedly secondary as I went on to obtain an MFA in Painting.

As I began to make etchings on my own, I fell in love with the medium. I studied books about printmaking, aiming to fill the glaring gaps in my knowledge visible in my early etchings and in my own teaching. The craft, history, and look of etching grew on me, and I was, to a point, forgiving of my own incompetence, understanding that I was unlikely to be good at something I had barely ever done before. My early prints were full of surprises, good and bad; I saw that I would only rarely get what I wanted or expected. Whether I would eventually be able to, I thought, was a matter of making more and more prints. I’ve since made 800 prints and I still don’t get what I want. I learned to love about etching that my own expectations don’t seem to matter that much.

I stumble upon less technical and more makeshift approaches to etching. I start out broadly, a little uncontrolled, but with a clear geometric underpinning. I don’t really want to know how the image will look beforehand — too many unexpectedly and potentially satisfying things may happen to exclude the accidental or the momentarily inspired ahead of time. I may work on as many as 30 or more etchings at once.

I had been thinking in sequence or series since my painting days, and I often link my etchings by theme. I chose to bind groups of my prints with accompanying text into books. Books proved an ideal vehicle to connect images rather naturally, ordering and structuring a sequence, and allowing the viewer a controlled pace and progress through the continuity, connection, and unfolding of images, each image Artist’s Statement “Fail; fail again; fail better.” — Samuel Beckett complete yet linked to every other through the structure of the book. I like the idea of a visual story whose narrative may be inferred but will remain ambiguous, its shapes, textures, and movement guiding the viewer. Text and visual image speak in parallel, through association, synthesis, or divergence. In 1989 I founded Bridge Press, now in Kennebunk, Maine, to publish limited edition artist’s books and etchings.

I embrace themes of loss, futility, destruction, and unexpected, redemptive beauty, themes tied to the tradition of printmaking, whose imagery has always tended toward critical commentary and serious contemplation, and often toward humor and irony as well. I am as often inspired by what I read or listen to as by what I see. I look back at images from old postcards and photographs, prints from my collection, or at older books.

The process of etching is physical and elemental, requiring force and pressure, inviting aggression and then delicacy, conjoining fire, water, earth, and air. There is something about seeing an image into metal that implies permanence, duration, and enduring presence, a presence I hope will persist in my work.

~Brian D. Cohen

To see more of Brian Cohen’s works on paper and his process, visit his website here.