Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Artist Craig McPherson in front of his pastel on linen work depicting the Edgar Thomson steel mill in Braddock.

By Lillian Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

NEW YORK -- Craig McPherson chose a nearly lost art to depict a dying one after his first time through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, into the night of Pittsburgh.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Reviving a lost art, Craig McPherson made some of his own tools to work in mezzotint, a painstaking process that requires long hours of roughening a copper plate before ink can be applied. This work shows a street in Braddock and, beyond, the Edgar Thomson Works. Click photo for larger image. If you go ... Where: A number of Craig McPherson's steel works, as well as works inspired by theater, are on display through May 27 at the Forum Gallery, 745 Fifth Ave. at 57th Street, New York. Information: 212-355-4545.

It was 1982, and his Braddock-born fiancee, May Miculis, was driving.

"It was an overcast winter night, and, looking up the river as we emerged from the tunnel, you could see two sprawling steel mills in the distance," wrote McPherson, a New York artist. "Just then, the sky flared from a pour [of molten steel], orange through gray clouds of smoke, which was reflected the length of the river."

He was drawn to the mills and visited them on annual trips to Pittsburgh to visit May's family, making drawings from perches near the mills in Braddock and Clairton.

The works that evolved from those visits, as well as others of a range of subjects from chop shops to Yankee Stadium to world harbors, have made McPherson a significant artist.

His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the British Museum in London; the Art Institute in Chicago, the Cleveland Museum; the Library of Congress; the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of Art in New York; and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

His gigantic mural cycle of world harbors, commissioned by the American Express Co. for its corporate headquarters, stretches 400 feet around the lobby of the building.

To render the steel images that came from his visits here, McPherson chose mezzotint, a print-making process used in the 17th through 19th centuries to reproduce portraits and other paintings and made obsolete by photography more than a century ago.

Few artists produce mezzotints today, and here's why:

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Works depicting Pittsburgh's steel industry are part of New York artist Craig McPherson's show at the Forum Gallery in New York City. Click photo for larger image.

McPherson, 56, spends three hours a day, seven days a week -- for up to a year or more on a large work -- preparing the copper plate by roughening the surface with a hand tool called a rocker.

That process, called "rocking the plate," allows the copper to hold the ink across its entire surface. If run through a press, the plate would produce a solid black print.

McPherson then traces a mirror-image schematic for the work onto the plate with a ballpoint pen and carbon paper.

Next, he uses two types of tools, a scraper and a burnisher, to smooth the roughened surface of the plate in varying degrees -- a little for darker grays, more for lighter grays and perfectly smooth for white.

When the plate is ready, he applies ink that he makes himself and wipes it with his bare hand in rhythmic motions. He periodically daubs his inky right hand on a folded-up paper towel in his left hand. The wiping clears the ink from the burnished areas so that they print lighter -- white in the completely smooth areas, shades of gray in other burnished areas.

He then pulls prints (called proofs) on a press, often making many adjustments before he's satisfied; some differences in tone, texture or detail from one proof to another are easily discernible, others are so subtle they're only apparent to a practiced eye.

"It takes 20, 25 proofs to get to know the plate," he said in his New York studio this month. He might throw away as much as 40 percent of the images he prints.

The plate, with its tiny fragile burrs, is very delicate and wears down quickly, so that only a limited number of prints can be made from it.

McPherson uses tools that range from replicas of those used in the 17th century to folded credit cards for grasping plates and prints so that his ink-stained hands won't smudge them

McPherson has done works of mills in operation as well as depictions of dilapidated streets of former steel towns. The melancholy beauty of the dying landscape of the mills and mill towns is suited to the evocation of light coming from darkness in mezzotints.

He said he chose a nearly obsolete, labor-intensive technique because it produced images close to his own realistic drawing style, not because he saw it as relating to his subject matter.

The process itself draws him, though.

"When you do the rocking three hours a day for 12 months, it's like you're embedding energy. When you burnish it, you release it."

He said that the layers and layers of work -- the repetitive rocking, the painstaking burnishing, the process of redoing details over and over -- adds to the art.

"To reach a certain density takes time. I think in terms of weight, of air and weight. You have to wait until [the work] reaches a certain weight. You have to be able to feel the air in it." He pointed to a depiction of the Clairton works, with a snow-covered coal pile in the foreground. It hangs in his current show at the Forum Gallery in Midtown Manhattan.

"You can feel the air in it. Before you couldn't."

McPherson, who grew up in Wichita, Kan., said he knew he wanted to pursue art at 15. He graduated from the University of Kansas before moving in 1975 to a heatless, hot-waterless, leaking studio in the Washington Heights neighborhood at the northern end of Manhattan, then a crime-ridden area.

He lived on $15 a week and observed the life outside his window, which included a nearby chop shop and a bird's-eye view of Yankee Stadium. He observed the process of stripping down stolen cars in detail. He remembers the man who was an expert at loading the carcasses of the stripped cars onto a flatbed truck.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette McPherson became inspired by industrial Pittsburgh when he began visiting his wife May's family. During a 1982 trip to Pittsburgh with May, a native of Braddock, McPherson first saw the city's steel mills and was drawn to them. Click photo for larger image.

"It was this little guy with no neck, a bald head. He was a genius at getting those crab shells of cars onto that truck. He would winch the first one onto the bed, then the second one, then he'd get into the truck, go 5 mph, then jam on the brakes to slam the second car into place," wedged on top of the first. Finally he'd balance a third on top.

In the winter, McPherson hung drop cloths in the missing windows of his studio to block the freezing air. He watched a homeless man who wore a military coat with a built-in cape year-round stomp back and forth in the light of a trash can fire, fueled by burning pallets.

The endurance of that man, as well that of the brutally hardworking steelworkers he later learned about when he began working on his milltown prints, made a lasting impression.

He made the things he saw from his Washington Heights window his subjects: that burning trash can, the chop shop, and finally, Yankee Stadium. His mezzotint of the stadium brought him out of obscurity and bad living quarters.

A 1985 commission to do a gigantic set of murals of world harbor cities for the American Express Building (once a neighbor to the World Trade Center towers, now perched at the edge of the pit of Ground Zero) paved the way to other commissions, freedom to pursue long-planned projects, quarters on the Lower East Side, and a new home for May's mother, who was finally forced out of her Braddock home when the back door was smashed by an intruder.

The mills have come in and out of his work over the past two decades. He always has several projects going, putting things away when he gets stuck, pulling them back out when he's ready to try again. He still has Pittsburgh area subjects in the works, and also has visited Timken Co.'s specialized steelmaking plant in Canton, Ohio. Its ovens appear in works in his current show.