Learn the Levigator in Three Minutes or Less

Today was my first day at Tamarind and I'm so beat I can hardly move my fingers to type this post. But don't worry... I'm a trooper. I'll try to fill you in as much as my tired body will allow.

Carrie returned to Saint Louis yesterday afternoon. After a fine dinner of Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas at El Patio Saturday night, we spent Sunday morning grocery shopping and counting down the minutes until she had to go. Due to the fact that the ABQ bus doesn't run on Sundays (because apparently no one needs to go to the airport on the Lord's day), Carrie had to drive herself to the airport and I could only stand in the driveway and wave sadly as she pulled away.

After her departure, I walked back and forth in my little house, trying to figure out ways to occupy myself. I cleaned, I made cookies, I made dinner, I worked on a print that I started two years ago. I tried to watch baseball, but it was blacked out. Then I tried to listen to baseball and it was rained out. Mostly I just wanted to make myself tired enough that I could go to sleep and be bright eyed and bushy tailed for my first day at Tamarind.

Of course, I wasn't really able to sleep. I had to be at Tamarind at 8am and after a few rough hours of sleep, I was up early to shower and eat and work myself into a frenzy.

I wasn't sure how to dress on the first day, since I didn't know exactly what we'd be doing. I didn't want to look too rough, but I also didn't want to get ink all over my nice clothes. In the end, the only thing I regretted about my clothing choice was the Birkenstocks that I wore. I spent most of the day standing and they weren't the most comfortable.

I arrived at Tamarind about ten minutes before class started. There were lots of awkward silences and introductions between the student printers. Then Marge, Tamarind's Director, welcomed us and went over a few things. We got our manuals and keys to the building and supply cards and lots of handouts. Then we spent the rest of the day with Rodney, our Education Director. After a few hours of listening to Rodney yammer, we were shown around the studio and given demos on preparing ball-grained aluminium plates and stones. Then around 3pm we were allowed to leave or start working on our plates and stones for the first project.

I opted to stay and start grinding my stone.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, Lithography is traditionally done on giant hunks of Bavarian limestone. The nice thing about using stones is that after you draw and print your image, you can reuse the stone by grinding the previous image off. Some people prefer to use a slightly smaller stone to grind with. Other people use a levigator, which looks like this:



Basically, it's a circular hunk of steel, with a spinning handle on one side and a heavy counter-weight on the other side. You put water and grit on the stone, then put the levigator on top of it and spin it around and around until the image is gone and the stone is level and polished and ready to draw on again.

If you want to know more about this process you can go to a fantastic little page that someone put together about How Stone Lithography Works.

I'm not exactly a pro with the levigator. I think at least one of the fine institutions I attended had the device, but it just seemed so much easier to use another stone to grind with. The added bonus of using a stone, is that when you're done, you have TWO stones that are ready to go. It's like killing two birds with one stone. Or is that one bird with two stones? Either way... If I've ever actually used a levigator before, I don't remember it. Let's just say that this made for a very interesting couple of hours for me. I think it took me just a few minutes to get the hang of it, but it was still pretty stressful. After a good two hours of trying to undo the damage I did in the first two minutes, I finally got the stone in a state where I felt good about leaving it for the night.