BACON, Peggy

Drypoint

13 x 15" MATTED

Artist Peggy Bacon recalls her instructor realist painter George Bellows, "Everyone liked him but I was an exception…he was such a boastful man. It was always big I, little you...But he was forceful and he did sort of jolt a lot of people into doing a little bit better than they might have done…I remember I did a drypoint of the Bellows class with Bellows in the middle and I made prints of it. He said, 'Who did this? That's wonderful. That's really fine. That's the best thing that's been done in this class all year.’" Drypoint involves pressing a drawn line into a metal plate. The incised mark holds the ink which is then transferred to the paper. Bacon achieved a particularly crisp line by reducing the ridge, or burr, along the mark. "I love drypoint…that wonderful feeling that you have for the material and the real strength that you have to employ to get the line the right depth and richness and to do the cross-hatching so that the metal doesn't break down but still you get a rich black. I trained myself to hold the needle upright so…that you don't raise a big burr on one side and none on the other, then the plate doesn't wear down, you see. And I have had enormous editions considering." Oral history interview with Peggy Bacon, 1973 May 8, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

1919

BACON, Peggy

b. United States, 1895 - 1987

Gift of Don Trevey to the Ken Trevey Collection of American Realist Prints

1992.49