Just because nobody writes about it...
Ernest Freed was my drawing and printmaking teacher at Cal State Northridge and for a few night classes at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles from 1962 to 1965. He was a big man with a slaggy kind of old woman's face, a thick stock of brown-black hair, soft spoken, and had a bad leg. I always thought it was a WWII injury, but now I don't think so. I think he was out of the military because of it. He had big hands and was a quiet, mid-western guy, a little old fashioned even back then.
In his night printmaking classes he introduced a method, showed some examples of his work to illustrate the basic technique, showed some slides of more famous work, and then walked us through the basic process using an example plate. The first project was etching on hardground. He suggested we do a drawing first and then transfer it to the plate, but it wasn't mandatory. Once he got the class started, he would go around to each student and make small suggestions and see how we were doing, then he would go over to his table and get back to work on his projects. At that particular time he was working on a series of large copper intaglio plates based roughly on Shakespeare's tragedies as the rough subject matter: Macbeth, Othello, Lear, Cleopatra, Merchant of Venice. Each plate was about three feet by four feet, which is huge for a copper plate. He had installed a giant etching press with about a four by eight foot bed that could print in this size range and must have weighed several tons. I had no idea how rare such equipment was or how lucky I was to have such a studio available.
Freed started his prints with a large drawing done in graphite, ink, sometimes turpentine washes, with bits and pieces of textured papers and cloth held on with a soft sticky varnish. When the drawing was done, he transferred it to the plate with hardground, run through the press. After the transfer, he began to engrave the major lines of the composition. After several weeks of engraving, he washed off the ground and printed it, taking one of the proofs and reworking the composition and often transferring it back on the plate with collage materials that cut through a soft ground, while he varnished out other areas completely. Then it was etched in acid, cleaned, and reprinted. Various materials were used as a resist. For example Kero syrup could be dribbled or brushed on, dried hard with a varnish overlay and then etched. The acid would dissolve the sugar and be resisted by the varnish. This back and forth system was continued for several more weeks as he developed the overall texture of the plate, mapping out major areas and cutting deeper and deeper with more and more complex engravings and etchings. At about this stage, he would begin to work on the color plates that would make up the colors. These were actually woodcuts done on a thin veneer of plywood, usually mahogany or birch. He would change metal engraving burins for woodcut chisels and cut out the major blocks of color. He would do at least three woodcuts, one for each color, usually the primaries.
In the final stages of the print, Freed would begin to assemble the total image. First he would print the lightest color wood cut first, say yellow, then red, and finally blue. With each color the paper had to be dried, then re-soaked, and then printed with the next color. The inks were usually thin so that when colors overlapped they created their respective secondaries. In other words, a yellow area overlapped with blue would print green in the final stage. The final print run was the copper plate inked in black. By this time the copper plate had been turned into a thin relief sculpture with deep cuts, heavily embossed textures, wide thick engraved lines and several large shapes barely touched. The plate itself could be framed and made an art work all its own. He had done that with at least one plate, making it into the surface for a coffee table at his place.
He usually did an edition of fifty for smaller work, maybe an edition of twenty-five for large pieces, so that the above print process had to be repeated without mistakes many times to complete an edition. Over the three and half years I was at Northridge, Freed had filled up the storage space and drawing cabinets of the print studio with proofs and had maybe half a dozen large plates leaning against the storage rooms walls. At night after everybody had gone home I would open this storage area up and go through his work, bring them out to the studio tables and just study them. I stole a few older proofs and hoped he didn't miss them---although later he gave me the eye once when he found me by myself working on one of my plates in the studio late at night.
In terms of style, Freed's work was heavily influenced by the bio-morphic abstraction of surrealists like Paul Klee, Juan Miro, Picasso in certain moods, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Stanley Hayter from the UK, and the Americans de Kooning and Gorky, with touches of Chagal, Beckmann, and Nolde. He was part of a revival movement in graphic arts, figure drawing and printmaking in the mid-west and then Los Angeles at Otis in the 40-50s. Some of his contemporaries at Otis, Jepson and USC included Howard Jepson, Francis de Ederly, Rico Lebrun, and Howard Warshaw.
Freed's work was deeply philosophical in the art world sense of the word, and struggled with a strain of expressionistic humanism that has all but disappeared since that period. It is a little difficult to explain just how difficult Freed's work was to actually do. Each of the masses and shapes, the dark cut outs and brilliant highlights were shapes that had to be struggled with, physically cut with a burin, an acid etch, or a wood surface, scared with chisels and knives, inked and then printed numerous times to arrive at the final result. It is one thing to get lucky with a splash in paint or ink, make a characteristic gesture or stroke, work a painted surface the way de Kooning did in his Woman series. It is another world altogether, if the medium is a copper plate where mistakes, false starts, and impulsive directions that had to be abandoned would remain in some form or other under all later reworking. Engraving can not be erased, but some etched areas can be worked back into a semi-polished surfaces with hours of work with burnishing tools. There is always an element of risk, accident, and difficult passages that have to be lived with and worked into the apparently intentional final result.
In `64, I went to the University of Iowa on the excuse to study printmaking with Mauricio Lasansky, who Freed had met in the WPA printmaking revival in late 30s. They had both been to Stanley Hayter's course/workshop on printmaking in the 40s in New York (aka Atelier 17). Hayter had taught at the New School of Social Research and held workshops on printmaking for some of the European surrealists exiles including Kurt Seligmann, Max Ernest, Fernand Leger and others. Peggy Guggenheim was one of the sponsors.
But by the 60s in Iowa, Lasansky was already too famous and too busy to be much of a teacher. He was in the middle of producing his Nazi Drawing series that would later end up at the Whitney in 1966. I preferred Rico Lebrun's version on the same subject done almost twenty years earlier and shown at the LA County Museum. I saw Lasansky a few times when he ordained to come to the studio, but mostly his graduate students ran the place. Ironically Northridge had a bigger press and a lot more room to work. Well screw it, I thought, I'll hang out with the creative writing students at Iowa instead, so I did.
At the end of the year I painted houses in Iowa City with another art student that summer and then moved back to LA. In the fall back at Northridge I did a brief independent study with Freed and painted a mural thirteen feet high and about twenty feet long. He came to my place which was an abandoned real estate office that was to be torn down that I had rented for few months for fifty bucks. did the mural on one of the walls. I slept on a mattress on the flood, drank instant coffee and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
When Freed came by, he spent his time looking at the mural and some drawings, asked me some questions about the compositions, discussed some of the problems in a helpful way, why I had done certain things, smiled, frowned a little, and said something of mild praise. He gave me two units of A, which was all he could give an independent study project. At the end of that semester I went to Berkeley for grad school
CG