Handmade Dog Cyanotype 22

Handmade Dog Cyanotype No. 22 of 32

Norman Durkee, a Seattle composer, was a friend of mine and he sent me a tape of works made on his new Buchla synthesizer. One was titled, "Handmade Dog," a silly, rambling ditty with his synthesized "Woof woof" interspersed. My thought was to collaborate with Norman with my own handmade dogs. I had been doing such hand-shadow prints for some time. The technique, cyanotype, is sometimes called "sun printmaking" because sunlight is ideal, especially in months when the sun is high and rich in UV. The method requires coating paper with chemicals, letting it dry in a dark place, and then - in the sun as I did in this series - laying the paper out flat and putting like one's hand on it. Where the sun strikes the chemical, a reaction occurs and after some seconds or a minute, the paper is shielded until it can be washed. In cold, running water, the unexposed chemicals dissolve and wash away. Where the sun struck, the chemicals became insoluble and turn blue. Invented at the time many photo processes were (the mid-19th Century), it never achieved commercial value except in making blueprints and fine art photographs. To make the series of 32 prints I made a cyanotype or two a day in the summer of 1982, climbing to the rooftop hatch to the top of the Journal of Commerce Building in Seattle, which was home to the Triangle Studios for me from 1977-1983. See my memoir, "Dumb Hope: My curious life - 1981-1990."