During my MFA years at the Visual Studies Workshop, I went to Chicago for a semester to study dye transfer printing with Larry McPherson. Larry patiently took me through the laborious darkroom steps to make a ‘true’ dye transfer print from a color transparency. After successfully mastering a single print, he taught me possible ways to experiment with the materials.
These hand colored dye transfer prints date from 1975 and 1976. I continued to work with dyes through the mid-80’s. Each print is unique and very stable. I mixed yellow, magenta and cyan dyes to apply color with soft brushes to the processed sheet of matrix film. The finished matrix was rolled into contact with Kodak dye transfer paper and the dyed image transferred. Print sizes vary between 8×10 and 11×14. Most of the one-of-a-kind prints are at my archive at the SMU DeGolyer Library.
