Veta Gorner • Techniques. Production. Process.

“I work as an artist with the matrix — the plate, the block, the screen. The matrix is where the work happens; the press is where it becomes visible. Hours of biting, carving, or building settle into a single moment when paper meets plate under pressure. That moment is an impression — an event, each time it’s made. I work across etching, silkscreen, woodcut, and lithography, on a range of papers and surfaces, and no two impressions come out the same.“.

Making a print is a manifold process. Unlike drawing or painting, where the final piece is made directly on a surface, a print is transferred from a matrix — carried from plate, block, or screen onto paper.

Creating a matrix is rarely linear either — it moves through many stages, each one shaped as much by what the material allows as by what the artist intends. An original print is an impression of that unique matrix, its form created and guided by the physical properties of the materials worked.

An artist’s print takes shape through making — thought and material working out a form together through production and strategic thinking. The process is both proactive and reactive: acting on the matrix, and being changed by what it does back, which is what makes it demanding and rewarding.

Idea is never fixed.

It can be a direction, a scheme, sometimes it arrives from an influence or a reaction against one.

It rarely survives contact with the matrix unchanged — a plan for a plate shifts the moment the needle or the gouge meets it. Idea is essentially an urge to communicate something pressing to the world; it is also a need to hear back from the world itself.

A sketch is a formative map for an idea.

It’s a low-risk space where the visceral starts to become visible, tested and adjusted before anything is at stake. Its real job is to mediate the specificity of the hand gesture, training it and the pressure behind it for what the matrix will demand — paper forgives, the plate doesn’t.

Going into the matrix without that preparation is its own recipe for failure. The sketch ends where the hand is ready to commit; the matrix is where that commitment becomes permanent.

A stage where a visual idea and the matrix’s material demands work out their form together — testing what the plate, block, or screen will actually allow, and what it won’t. Experimenting is still a major part of this, but the aim is to edit down to a lean system that keeps hold of the idea that got you excited in the first place.

In a print, that means balancing technical execution — the quality and longevity of the impression you’ll produce — with visual impact. A considered choice here is what makes the print both beautiful and meaningful. You want the work to start living its own life once the impression is made.

All printmakers tend to develop an unwavering enthusiasm for the materials they work with, and their capacity to offer seemingly endless creative possibilities. Handling and manipulating physical matter is where the idea gets tested, changed, and sometimes overruled — the material has as much say in the outcome as any ambition brought to it. A print’s production can be both complex and simple, but it’s always this negotiation between hand, matter, and intention that drives it.

A copy repeats what already exists; an impression happens once, in the instant the press comes down, and no two are ever quite the same. That instant belongs to a single continuous process — the hand’s training in the sketch, the matrix’s resistance worked through in design, and the life a print goes on to have once it leaves the press are all part of it, intensifying at the point where paper meets plate.

Printmaking engages the artist with a rich cultural and material language — built on both creative and utilitarian traditions, and a gateway to imaginative discovery. Its processes are rooted in the manipulation of physical matter, drawing on human inventiveness at every turn. Artists distil and forge ideas through making, testing concepts against matter until something real comes of it.

Printmaking hence reflects a basic human need to work closely with matter — learning its intelligence by hand, and staying in awe of it the whole time.

Traditionally, metal plates were used to produce stable and consistent impressions. A metal plate — copper, zinc, aluminium, or steel — can be engraved, where a tool cuts grooves directly into the surface, or etched, where a chemical reaction bites the design into it. The surface looks clean and detached, but it holds precision and ambiguity at once: exact enough to carry a line true to the width of a tool, and unpredictable enough that no two acid bites behave quite the same way. Numerous techniques allow printmakers to produce both line and perceived tone.

Working a metal plate’s surface gives both great resilience and a clarity and fluidity that’s hard to match.

Mesh printing has its origins in China, where silk was stretched over wooden frames — countless tiny openings letting ink push through and settle onto a level surface, building up lines or areas of perceived tone. The mesh’s own weave sets the terms of what’s possible before a mark is even made — a finer weave holds fine, exact detail, a coarser one gives looser, more textured marks.

Where a plate holds ink in a bitten or cut recess and pulls it up onto paper under heavy pressure, mesh lays ink flat on top of the paper in a single sharp pass — which is why it can hold a saturated, opaque field of colour that etching, built from line and perceived tone, can’t easily reach. These days synthetic materials are commonly used, making silkscreen a versatile, capable, and hardworking medium.

The hard, flat stone surface is responsible for the invention of lithography, the print medium based on the idea that oil and water do not mix. The invention quickly proved technically reliable and took over from etching as a dependable commercial method. In time, stone got phased out commercially and replaced with thin metal plates, yet lithography remained fascinating to artists working directly with its enduring qualities. Unlike a plate that’s cut or bitten, or a mesh that’s stencilled, a stone is drawn on directly with greasy crayon or wash — the mark you make is the mark that prints, holding a continuous tonal range from the finest stipple to a solid wash that neither etching nor screenprint can reach. Now, the lithographic process relies on commercially prepared pre-sensitised metal plates and photo image transfers. Stone lithography is rare and requires a dedicated specialist setup.

Woodblock carving is probably the oldest type of printmaking. It requires minimal chemistry during the printing process. Wood is worked almost always in relief — what’s carved away stays bare, and the untouched, raised surface carries the ink and prints. Metal can do the same — I print relief from metal myself — which puts the real distinction where it belongs: between two relationships a mark can have to ink, recessed or raised, a matter of process rather than of material. Wood is also the most accessible matrix surface to work with. The woodcut is versatile and produces impressive results, both in miniature format and in oversized work. Different varieties of wood surfaces can be used, from unique slow-growing specialty woodblocks to humble plywood. As long as you can carve, it will print.

A print is what a matrix becomes able to say once ink and pressure meet it. It carries the artist’s intentions, but altered — filtered through what the plate, block, or screen insisted on along the way. Every impression carries the accumulated weight of the whole process behind it, from the idea’s first contact with the sketch through to the moment of pressing.

Every original artist print is a unique work of art.

Tools are both the instruments and the orchestra of the studio, creators of marks and character. The tools in the studio range from expensive and specialist – to something mundane and simple, like a nail or a found feather.

Some tools, like an etching needle, become friends for life. I have used the same needle for over 15 years and still love it.

A matrix is a body that persists through the encounters it makes possible — producing impressions that express its own structure, changed by producing them, and carrying that change forward as its history. Any flat surface can take on this role: metal, wood, cardboard, plastic, and more. As I work between mediums and techniques, choosing a matrix is critical for me and sets the tone of how a piece looks, feels, and interacts with ink and paper.

A moment of impact creates what we call a print — the pressure applied to transfer ink from the plate onto paper is critical to this process. This is where the matrix’s encounters actually happen: hand, press, and paper meeting the plate at once. All printmakers develop a particular sensitivity to pressure, whether it comes from a press or any other tool that applies force. Pressure is the driving creative force in printmaking. Too little, and the plate’s history stays trapped beneath the surface, never fully transferred; too much, and the paper tears or the finest lines flatten out. Getting it right takes years of judgement — reading the plate, the paper’s dampness, the felt blankets on the press bed — and that judgement is where technical skill turns into something closer to instinct.

Paper is undeniably a precious cultural commodity — made by many hands before it ever reaches a press, carrying that craft with it into the studio. Humble and mighty, fragile and resilient, endlessly versatile. Every impression is a symbiotic bond of paper and ink, with paper standing as an equal creative partner throughout. It carries its own record of the encounter too — the plate’s edge pressed into it, fibres compressed where the ink sat, a deckle or a fold holding its own history alongside the image. The moment an artist presses onto it is a cultural moment in its own right.

An etching starts with covering a metal plate in an acid-resistant wax called ground, then drawing a design through it with an etching needle. The plate goes into acid, which bites into the exposed lines and etches the design into the metal.

Once bitten, the plate is inked and wiped carefully, taking off all surplus colour. It’s set on the flat bed of the press, with damp paper laid over the top. Manipulating the mark-making, the depth and extent of the bite, and the printing itself all give the artist real range within etching.

Original lithographs depends on a simple chemical principle — the mutual antipathy of grease and water. The artist draws the image with greasy materials directly onto a grease-sensitive surface, or transfers it onto a specially photosensitised plate. Ink rolled onto the plate sticks only to those sensitised, greasy areas. From here the process splits. Commercially, the image prints through an offset process: the plate transfers ink to a rubber blanket, and the blanket transfers it onto paper — fast, mechanised, and built for consistency. Hand lithography works the same chemistry at a different pace: slower, human-controlled, hand-drawn and hand-pulled rather than run through an industrial press — this is what “original lithograph” actually means. I often print my litho plates on the etching press instead, which slows things further and makes the process harder to control, but lets me print onto wet paper and bring higher pressures into the process than lithography usually allows.

Screenprinting uses a woven mesh to support an ink-blocking stencil. The stencil blocks out everything except the open areas of mesh, and a squeegee pulls ink across the screen, forcing it through those open threads onto the paper below. Each colour typically needs its own screen and its own pass, registered precisely against the last. It’s also the fastest medium in printmaking, which is why so much industrial application — packaging, textiles, signage — has grown up around that speed and repeatability. I use it differently: for colour blocks, on surfaces that resist or don’t fit under a printing press at all, and in a monotype way, building up many layers by hand to make one unique work on paper rather than a repeatable edition.

This vocabulary comes from the market. It’s a shared code, precise enough that a dealer, a print room, and a collector who’ve never met can all mean the same thing by “25/75.” It exists for authentication, pricing, and trust.

Edition: The number of prints made from one matrix — plate, block, stone, or screen — is called an edition. The body of the edition is numbered (for example, 1/100 through 100/100) directly on the print. Additional proofs, such as artist’s proofs, are also part of the edition.

Impression: A single print pulled from a matrix under pressure — a distinct instance each time, carrying the particular condition of the matrix and the particular pressure of that pull, which is why no two are ever quite identical.

Numbering: Numbering indicates the size of the edition and the number of each particular print. Therefore, 25/75 means that the print is the 25th impression from an edition of 75.

Artist’s Proofs: These impressions are in addition to the numbered edition and are so noted in pencil as artist’s proof or A/P. The commonly acceptable number of artist’s proofs for a given edition is usually around 10% of the total.

“AN ORIGINAL PRINT IS A WORK OF ART THAT CANNOT BE PRODUCED ANY OTHER WAY”

I tend to work between a variety of printmaking media and methods, each complementing the ideas explored at the time. The print’s uniqueness comes from idea and execution shaping it together, neither one arriving first, which means it could not have been made any other way. That’s what makes the body of work original.

“JUST BECAUSE MULTIPLES ARE INVOLVED IT DOES NOT DENUDE THE WORK OF ITS ORIGINALITY”

The question of confusion comes from how every artist approaches repetition and deviation, especially when it comes to editioning — pulling multiple impressions from one matrix. There’s a broad range between tight control, aimed at making images alike, and the creative possibilities that allow for real variation between them. Beyond the rigid tradition of the Old Masters’ printmaking, artists today are freer to use printmaking as a means of expression rather than a means of producing multiples.

“THE PRINTMAKING PROCESSES AND ITS TECHNICAL RIGOUR INFLUENCES THE FINAL MESSAGE”

For me, printmaking is iterative — each state becomes the starting point for the next, one step forging the terms of the one after it. The medium therefore influences the work and becomes part of the message.

“UNIQUE ARTISTIC INTENTION DRIVES ORIGINALITY”

At the end, it’s artistic intention meeting what a particular matrix does under pressure that makes a print original — intention and material shaping the work together, neither arriving first. That draws equally on the artist’s skill and experience, and on the plate, block, or screen in front of them.

“TECHNIQUE OR ‘INSPIRATION’?”

An artist holds an engineer’s rigour and an eagerness for what escapes it in the same hand, all the way through. The room answers back too — how long the plate sits in the bath, the damp in the air that day, the light, the studio’s own rhythm shaping what the hand can do in the time it has. An engineer would correct all of it. An improviser never had rigour precise enough to be broken in the first place. The artist wants all of it together: control and its own undoing, environment and duration answering back alongside the matter itself.

“WHY I DRAW WHAT I DRAW AND HOW I DRAW IT…”

Most of my works are drawn freehand directly onto a zinc matrix plate. I do not make changes to my line drawings; I have learnt to trust my hand. I do not use models either. Knowing the physical structure of a body and knowing the person who moves through it are the same kind of knowledge — the structure itself carries meaning directly. A drawn line finds its own way as the hand moves — closer to touch than to the execution of a design decided in advance. What I’m after is tactile: marks that register in the body the way touch does, carrying meaning on terms words don’t reach.