Nocturnal Images

Dick Swift

Color, texture, and an eye for elegant composition illustrate how Swift's unique approach to the intaglio processes made him a master of the technique.

Los Angeles area printmaker Dick Swift was another printmaker who studied with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, experimenting with many of the intaglio innovations that were being developed there, including soft-ground, shaped plates and viscosity (simultaneous color) printing. Swift went on to teach printmaking and many of those methods at the University of Long Beach, California for 30 years. "Nocturnal Imagery" was created not long after his work at the Atelier 17 in Paris in 1964-'65. Whether he worked in color or black and white, Swift's grasp of technique made his work inimitable.

In Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California, Jennifer Anderson describes Swift’s processes: “Swift combined representational and abstract images and had a measured control of the soft-ground process. He pressed textured materials into the waxy soft ground and then etching the resulting textures into a metal plate, building a deeply dimensional surface that easily adapted to both intaglio and relief printing. He mastered viscosity printing, a technique created by Hayter that relied on rolling ink with different degrees of tackiness onto a plate with the softer ink pushing into lower areas and stiffer ink remaining on the higher raised areas. This resulted in a luminous but dense layering of colors in a print.”