"A year after turning sixty, while immersing myself in mezzotint, I began to feel like a young artist again. Everything I worked at was filled with energy and intensity. I loved starting with a world of blackness and drawing the light. Every touch on the plate is a glint of illumination, and my burnisher is like a wand that reveals and defines form as I probe into the dark." - Robert Kipniss, 2011
Kipniss created a handful of mezzotints from 1982-84 but did not focus on this medium intently until 1990. He had his first solo mezzotint show in New York in 1992. He also showed mezzotints in 1995 at his first solo print show in England, and that year they comprised his first show of prints in Germany. Tall Trees at Night (2001) is in five museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, and the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, both in London.
When a copper plate is roughened in preparation for working on it, thousands of tiny holes are produced on the surface of the plate to hold the ink. Kipniss's preference has been for mechanically roughened plates because of their greater uniformity. Unlike many makers of mezzotints, he prefers using a burnisher rather than a scraper for reducing the depth of the holes, a process that controls the amount of ink held on the plate. The burnisher allows him freer motion and a greater range of pressure, as a pencil would, giving him the ability to create an image that looks drawn rather than machine crafted. Over time, Kipniss sought "narrower ranges of middle tones" while still bringing out the richness and resonance of darks characteristic of mezzotints. He has worked with master printer Anthony Kirk from 2003 to the present, first when Kirk was associated with the Connecticut Center for Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut, and then at Kirk's own studio in North Salem, New York.
Tall Trees at Night is one of Kipniss's many mezzotints that view trees fairly close up at dusk or night and show a play of light upon them. The characteristics that became increasingly prominent in his mature work, his concern with capturing the essence of form and with even more subtle light effects, are clearly apparent. The trees in Kipniss's mezzotints have an especially strong purity of form when only their trunks are depicted. Sometimes leaves are spread across the trees, adding more movement and increasing the technical challenge.
Window w/vase & forest (2000) is representative of still lifes that show a vase of plant cuttings, most often of stems with leaves. The vase is generally viewed close up before a window on a surface that may or may not be visible. Occasionally the bottom part of the sash is showing, and usually trees are beyond. Here, part of the view into the distance is through three layers of glass, and the form to the left is part of a chest of drawers. A painting done in reverse predates this print, and in both Kipniss extemporized the pale, delicate scrim of trees. The print is in four major museum collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California Palace of the Legion of Honor.