Cliché-verre (old glass) is a “semi-photographic” printmaking technique invented by an Englishman, Henry Fox Talbot, in 1834. Talbot’s method allows an artist to create an image by painting designs on a transparent glass surface. The glass is then placed on light-sensitive photographic paper in a darkroom and exposed to light. The glass acts as a large photographic negative. The painted designs on the glass block the light and appear as white when the “negative” is printed as a photograph. Any number of copies of the image can be made.
I amended Talbot’s process by completely painting one side of a piece of glass, then drawing designs by scraping off the paint. In certain areas, I scraped enough to create a clear space to “frame” my photographic images. Then I made one print with my chosen photographic image in the clear space and made a negative that so I could reproduce it. I called the result of this process a clichè-verre, but my technique was different from Talbot’s.