Following is the long story behind Red Coral, which is actually the story of the transformation of a piece of copper from table top, to etching plate for three different prints; Baechler Crowd (1997), Tree (1998), and Red Coral.
While visiting our gallery one day, in 1997, Donald Baechler told us he liked a steel and copper table in our office (a typical steel table with linoleum top, we had covered the damaged linoleum top with a sheet of copper). Donald especially liked the shape of the copper top, which had rounded corners and holes for bolts, and he decided it should become an etching plate. We brought the top to Felix Harlan & Carol Weaver who worked with Donald as he filled the plate with faces to produce Crowd, a print closely related to his concurrent "Crowd" paintings.
During the spring of 1998 (by which time the plate, now covered with faces, was back on our table), Donald asked if it was possible to etch away all but a faint trace of the old images. Felix and Carol managed to do so by putting the plate in an acid bath for three days. This long “open-bite” etching left just slight traces of Crowd’s faces, which now printed as “ghost” images in soft silvery-grays. Using this as a background, Donald painted the silhouette of a tree in sugar-lift, which was etched to a deep black, and this became Tree.
Our new project, Red Coral, combines the original Crowd/Tree plate, re-etched and printed in yellow, as a background, and a second plate on which Donald has painted the image of a coral, printed in Red. The faces are pretty much gone but the tree, in yellow makes a subtle but strong background. Donald is always interested in a very active background.
We feel Red Coral is a very special project, and the result of an equally special working relationship developed through 18 years of publishing Donald Baechler's etchings (this etching will be our 71st print together).
