Sizing time!

For the past week and a half, work on the flower show has had to share time with sizing the paper that I’ll be printing on in the coming year. It’s a multi-day process that involves soaking sheets of paper in a vat of warmed gelatin and then hanging to dry each day. I wrote about sizing in some detail last year in a post. Like the gum process, sizing is a slow, day-by-day, layer-by-layer process.

This year I’m sizing 96 sheets in all. I began more than a week ago by pre-shrinking each batch in hot water -- I want to make sure the paper is as small as it’s ever going to be before I start printing with it later in the year. 

Then for the next 6 days I coated 48 sheets of paper per day, three times each, in a large metal pan filled with 8 gallons of heated gelatin to soak the paper. Each batch is then hung to dry in my screen porch.

The final step is hardening the surface of the multi-layered gelatin paper. There are a couple of options out there for hardening. I use formaldehyde. 

As of yesterday afternoon, the annual ritual of paper sizing has come to an end for another year!

Matting and Framing

I want to say more about the bicycle/photo journey that I took up the C&O Canal a few months ago but I need to press pause on all that for now other than to say that in October, I’m aiming to show 5 Canal prints for the “Engaging Light” exhibit at FRANK gallery in Chapel Hill. Some of those prints already exist. Others do not. Yikes!

But for several weeks now, I’ve been distracted from printing by more time-sensitive tasks. The first has been preparing a one-person exhibit that begins September 9 at the FRANK gallery in Chapel Hill. (Full disclosure: I’m a founding member of the collective.) I’m showing 14 framed gum prints of backyard flowers.

Elecampane

 I look forward to showing them.

To get to that point without too much disruption to the rest of my life, I started working on the show several weeks ago. First up was trimming prints down to size allowing me to float them inside the slightly larger mat window rather than having the mat lay over the print. I’ve never done that systematically. I guess I'm liking the look. Trimming added a good deal of time to the project.

The next step took place in my covered wood shop. That’s where I make finished frames out of rough-cut wood that I get from a local mill. Completed, the wood frame needs to be protected. I use tung oil. I think it does a good job but I use it because it's one of only a few wood treatment options that aren't synthetic and honestly, I like the name. 

I mix the oil with pigments chosen from the darkroom and brush it onto the frame with the specific intent of marrying print to frame. Sometimes one color coat does it, but other times not. Applying a second layer, or a third, imitates the gum process. Nice!

Magnolia

The last step is assembling all the parts into a glass framed print ready to hang on the wall. As of late last night, assembly of all 14 prints is complete!

On to the other recent diversion -- Sizing...

More about the C&O

The Monacacy Aqueduct

The Chinese built aqueducts and the Romans built aqueducts. In fact, the Romans built lots of aqueducts all over their empire. Running into one in France or Spain would not surprise. But there? In western Maryland?

On my next visit to DC, the first couple of days were spent in the uplifting environment provided by the Jefferson Library Reading Room in the Library of Congress. I cullled through a dozen or so books, pamphlets, and documents related to the C&O.

Jefferson Reading Room 

Reading over my notes now, I was struck immediately by how much American history was wrapped up in the C&Os history. Here's a sampler:

Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, explored the Potomac in 1608 in search of a passage to the Pacific. His notes mention a native village called Tahoga (present day Georgetown) settled along a tributary (present day Rock Creek) that feeds into the Potomac (at Mile 0 on the C&O.)

Just past Rock Creek, Smith encountered the start of fifteen miles of navigational treachery provided by a series of falls and rapids culminating at Great Falls (Mile 14). The Potomac, Smith reported back, was a poor choice for westward expansion.

Rapids at Great Falls

As early as 1747, George Washington, a young surveyor for the Ohio Company, promoted the idea of a canal that could skirt the falls from Georgetown to Great Falls and so open up further growth of the colonies into the Ohio Valley. His idea was ignored until after the Revolution when then retired General Washington formed the Patowmack Co. and proceeded to persuade the Virginia and Maryland Assemblies to get behind the project.

The Canal at Great Falls with the famous Tavern in the background.

Those who lived and worked along the C&O came to refer to it most commonly as "The Old Ditch." But it took on other names as well, one of which was "President Washington's Dream."

The Potomac (and the Chesapeake Bay that it empties into) is the dividing line between Virginia and Maryland. As such, during the Civil War, the river and the canal were the literal border dividing the Union and the Confederacy. Appropriately, it became the locus of countless skirmishes, starting before the war began with John Brown’s raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry (Mile 60). Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, took place just a mile or two from the Canal (Mile 70). On a bike trip in May, I passed caves alongside the Canal that locals hid in during the fighting.

After the Civil War, the canal returned to business as usual. But throughout its history, that was never saying much. From the beginning, the canal was fraught with overruns and natural disasters. Which gets me back to my original surprise at seeing an aqueduct in western Maryland. I had always thought of aquaducts as coming from another age. Another time in history.

It turns out that was almost right. Here's the story of the canal in a nutshell: the very day in 1828 that the canal was officially begun, the first railroad track was laid outside Baltimore, MD headed westward. By the time the canal reached its terminus in Cumberland, MD in 1850, the railroad had already been operating out of there for 8 years. The fate of the Canal was sealed from its beginning. Industrial progress would be its ruin. 

Over time and further canal failures, the C&O would take on another nickname. The locals came to call it "George's Pipe Dream." Captain John Smith may have called it right from the start when he said the Potomac was a poor choice for westward expansion.

The railroad at the Canal's terminus

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I had been making a lot of photographs the past 6 months. The bulk of that new work -- film and digital -- has been made along the C & O Canal. The Canal runs from Georgetown, in Washington, DC to Cumberland, MD, 185 miles along the Potomac River. In its day the canal provided coal, primarily, as well as other goods, to the nascent capital.

Mile marker 0 with the infamous Watergate through the trees and the Kennedy Center (r) in the background.

I lived in Washington for 5 years in the early 80s. I knew there was a Canal Street in Georgetown. It was near a music club I used to visit. I knew, vaguely, that the street was named for a canal that used to operate nearby in the 19^th century. (The Canal began services in 1831 and ceased operation in 1924. It was declared a National Historical Park in 1961.)

The canal in Georgetown

I likely even walked over it or beside it on one of my excursions, but I have no recollection of even pausing to take note of its existence.

But that changed this past January when my wife and I were out exploring western Maryland on a beautifully overcast, and intermittently snowy day. Driving along a state maintained country road 10 or 15 miles south of Frederick, we came across a small, unadorned sign indicating a right turn would take us to the Monacacy Aquaduct. Having no idea what that was, we took the turn. An aquaduct? In Maryland?

That road to the right was gravel, a little bit in need of repair, and approximately one lane wide. It reminded me a little bit of driving in Ireland both by its lack of breadth as well as its unnerving quality, especially now with snow falling and no way to turn around if the road got worse.

We drove past the open fields of an active dairy farm, then through a patch of woods until the road and our little adventure ended at a small parking lot, just big enough to turn around and leave if the aquaduct turned out to be less than photogenic. It was not. I was enchanted. Love at first sight.

The Monacacy Aquaduct, at mile marker 42.2 on the C&O Canal.