I found a cache of my ancient artwork from the 1970s, when I was an art student. I’ve been scanning and posting a few of them. I thought this was an interesting piece of collage, it’s a “color transfer” Solvent is applied to magazine photos, the photo is placed against the paper, and the back of the photo is burnished to transfer the image. I think in this one, the solvent was acrylic medium. It has a beautiful texture and the colors are fairly strong. Color transfers tend to have weak, transparent colors, it’s hard to transfer much of the ink.
I found several of these prints, but this is the only one small enough to fit on my scanner, it’s about 8 inches square. I might post the other images later if I can get a good reproduction. These seem to be hard to capture.
I remember fiddling with color transfer a bit, sometime around ’77. This is what we used to do when we didn’t have photoshop. It is kind of like monoprinting, but you just have magazine photos as your source. You can manipulate the texture and depth of the transfer, but it’s pretty random. I guess we thought we were all Rauschenbergs, he used color transfer, but he had a professional printmaking atelier to do them properly. This color transfer process was popular around the printmaking department at the U of Iowa, it was so cheap and easy that a lot of students worked with it. But now it’s pretty much a lost art.