New Sun

Bernard Childs

Bernard Childs printed this work in the Summer of 1975 on a press made availb from the Parisian print shop Lacourière et Frélaut, using their taille-douce inks rather than the typographical inks he usually used. He only did 11 variant impressions, the plate was not editioned.

Judith Childs kindly shared this backstory for New Sun: "For years Bernard followed outer space exploration with excited attention as the life of the cosmos became one of the themes of his work. He began developing New Sun in 1973 and considered the 11 numbered proofs from 1975 to be trial proofs in his personal cosmic exploration and of the ways of light and color. The striking image of a little sun crawling over the belly of a planet jumped back to mind one morning five years later when the January 1980 issue of Scientific American landed on our doorstep. When we saw the cover with a 1979 photo of the never before photographed Io, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, we yelped with delight. The image was almost exactly the same as Bernard's New Sun."

Bernard Childs met the Danish silversmith Peer Smed and later remarked: “From this great craftsman I learned the beauty of metals, the feel of them in my hands, the excitement of fashioning them and the use of the special tools that bring them to life.”

He later mastered industrial tools and metalworking while employed as a machinist. Childs moved to Europe in 1951, living for a year in Italy before settling in Paris for the next fifteen years. In 1954, while spending a few months at Atelier 17 in Paris, Childs combined his interest in metal and knowledge of industrial tools to make experimental intaglio prints, using power tools to incise the plates.