Tanja Softić
Night Blooms: Sky, 2019, photogravure, aquatint, chine-collé, digital print, 12"x24"/ 31x62 cm
“Sometimes, you have to see what you do not want in order to go where you need to be.”
Tanja Softić is an artist living and working in Richmond, Virginia (USA). She approaches color as a manifestation of light, time of day, season or emotional tone and her printmaking work is simultaneously grounded in traditional media but experimental and interdisciplinary in approach. Tanja’s polyphonic, layered and evocative works are created with etching, photoetching, digital print and collage, along with mokuhanga, monotype, drawing and painting.
Currently Tanja is beginning work on an upcoming sabbatical project, "Circle" Back", a series of multi-media works on paper concerned with ideas of displacement and loss, and human relationship to land and place.
Are there specific associations towards color in your work?
Rarely. My way of thinking with color is somewhat utilitarian: Sometimes, elements of image need to recede or the layers of color need to overlap and create something surprising, something needs to be red, or black, as an exclamation point. Usually, I have to make and see a few proofs in rather different color schemes to begin honing in on what the image needs.
I often talk to my students about surprises in working in color in printmaking. I tell them about my first proofs, which are often "What was I thinking?" moments when it comes to color. Sometimes, you have to see what you do not want in order to go where you need to be.
Night Blooms: Streets, 2019, photogravure, aquatint, chine-collé, digital print, 12"x24"/ 31x62 cm
Night Blooms: Windows, 2019, photogravure, aquatint, chine-collé, digital print, 12"x24"/ 31x62 cm
“Somehow, in print, I can find that sweet spot between clarity and richness.”
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
The processes of plate separation, layering and registration are key to my conceptual and formal development of a print. As a painting major at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, I discovered I had a problem: I could not tell when the painting was finished. I felt that I could infinitely change, erase and add to it.
Somehow, thinking of the image in printing process, in it's "exploded view", various elements on different plates or pre-printed and collaged before or after plate layers, under or on top of layers of transparent color, the coalescence in the printing process--it just works for me.
What can printmaking ink achieve regarding color in your work that no other material can?
The particular way color layers in intaglio and other traditional media: transparency is the big part of it. I know that the print is overworked when the layers are so dense that they obscure each other. Somehow, in print, I can find that sweet spot between clarity and richness. There are so many moving parts and variables (how much transparency in ink, what kind of wiping and polishing of the plate, what kind of paper, what kind of pressure) that give me various options, and they also inform the more conceptual aspects of the print.
A Sound Like a Mighty Rushing Wind, 2020, etching, photopolymer etching, chiyogami and digital print collage, image size 16.5"x 47", paper size 22"x 52
What would your work be without color?
Well, it would be something. Truthfully, I always start my work in the studio with the earnest hope to pull a simple, monochromatic, linear image in, say, drypoint or etching. Simple drawing into the grounded plate is what made me begin working primarily in print.
But, as you can see from my work, that seems not to be, lately: my images get packed with layers and individual elements (some of them invading the print space via collage, post-printing.) But, you never know. Hope springs eternal.
If you could eat a color for dinner, what color would you choose and how would it taste?
It would be something bright and warm, like sunlight at dawn or dusk, something between pale orange and pale pink and it would taste like a fresh melon, still warm from the sunlight in the field.