At the Hennessey + Ingalls Bookstore (once in Santa Monica, California), I discovered that copper could do more than turn green.  An amazing book I soon purchased had photos and formulas for probably hundreds of ways this metal could be chemically treated to look black, like a rainbow, speckled, etc. It inspired me to immediately go to a sheet metal shop and have them fabricate a vat in which I could process copper sheets so that they could be used on some desks and a coffee table that I was designing for an office in Camarillo.

Later, my interest evolved to include other metals.  On a project in Ojai,  the fabricator, Tirzo Tec informed me of innumerable ways to finish stainless steel for a door.  From the architect Michael Heinrich and artist/fabricator Gale McCall, I learned of the expressive qualities of hot rolled steel and cold rolled steel.  These influences made me want to explore as many metals as I could in the metal girl series, as I wanted to see how they could affect the art I had selected.

But figuring out how to use silkscreen to etch text upon the copper I wanted to use was something I puzzled over for a long time.  I recalled industrial copper etching via silkscreen at my brother’s printed circuit business, but could find no information on the internet or library for a method more suitable for an artist in a home studio.  The experience of my cats killing a rat on my treasured large sheets of copper which I had placed on the carpet in my house for safe keeping made me painfully aware that copper could be easily permanently etched, even without the chemicals I personally didn’t want to squeegee through a screen.  Although etching with blood might get attention and promote my art, my decision was to seek something else and something non-toxic.  After scouring the refrigerator and making test samples, soy sauce beat out Grey Poupon.  It had to be thickened somehow, and I hit upon the idea of making a gravy of it with corn starch in a pan on my stove.  Thus, my etching process was born.