Forgotten Schoolhouse

by Jurgen Lorenzen

Title

Forgotten Schoolhouse

Artist

Jurgen Lorenzen

Medium

Photograph - Bromoil

Description

An abandoned, vintage schoolhouse photographed through the garden gate in Clover Lick, West Virginia.
This is a copy of a Bromoil print, a vintage form of creating art from a photographic image, a technique taught to me by my dear friend and Bromoil Master David Lewis.
The bromoil process was invented in 1907; the theory was put down on paper by
E.J. Wall, and set into practice by C. Welborne Piper. The intention was to create a
method of producing an inked image from an enlarged negative as an improvement of
the oil transfer process, which required a negative the same size as the desired print.
The dreamy, painterly appearance of bromoil prints was very popular with the Pictoralist
movement.
The process itself is based on the principle that oil and water repel one another,
and is used to create a photographic image made from ink. The process begins with an
ordinary silver gelatin print, which is a photographic image printed on special paper
containing a light-sensitive emulsion of silver crystals and gelatin. The finished print is
soaked in a bleaching solution of potassium dichromate and other chemicals. This
washes the silver crystals from the photographic paper and tans the gelatin so that a
faint trace of the image can still be seen. This bleached print is called a “matrix.” After
drying, the print is soaked in water before an oil-based ink is applied to the surface. The
ink is absorbed by the water-swollen gelatin in direct proportion to the amount of silver
in the original image; therefore, the water-swollen highlights repel the ink while the
bleach-hardened shadows absorb it. Using any variety of techniques, including
brushwork, use of a brayer or roller, and even more unconventional tools such as
cosmetic sponges a unique image can be created. Because of the need to ink the image
by hand, every print is one of a kind.

Uploaded

June 1st, 2020

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