Pale/1 – Pale/4, 2002
Etching and white ground aquatint
Suite of 4 prints; edition of 25
Plate size 7¼ × 39 in.; paper size 10¼ × 44 in.
Printed in cadmium orange, cadmium red-purple, cadmium maroon, and cobalt turquoise inks on Hahnemühle Copperplate bright white paper.
Published by Manneken Press
In each print of the Pale suite, a narrow white line arcs across a richly worked field of color, spanning one meter in length. The curvature of this trajectory ranges from pronounced in Pale/1 to nearly imperceptible in Pale/4. The imagery originated in The Center of the Lake, an artist’s book created in collaboration with poet Todd Young and published by Manneken Press in 2000. For the etching suite, Deese reconfigured the format—narrowing and elongating the image—and replaced the warm brown of the book’s serigraphs with a spectrum drawn from the cadmium and cobalt pigment families.
The plates were developed with a meticulous process employing multiple layers of white ground aquatint with hardground and softground line to produce surfaces of exceptional depth and subtlety. Each color is derived from a single pure pigment, hand-mixed with plate oil to create the ink.
Though abstract, the Pale images maintain a connection to perceptual experience, as well as to Deese’s larger dimensional Ripples and Waves paintings. Each arc represents a shallow segment of the ellipse perceived by a swimmer as the ripple he generates on a still body of water expands outward.
Printed from single copper plates in four distinct colors—cadmium orange, cadmium red-purple, cadmium maroon, and cobalt turquoise—the suite consists of four works titled Pale/1 – Pale/4.