Azimuth

Azimuth is a portfolio of ten black-ink intaglio prints. Planning a series of color etchings, Winters became frustrated with the thinness and transparency of colored inks. This led him to think about how a rich range of black inks could expand the scope of a collection of smaller drawings he had been doing in graphite and ink. Winters' customary practice is to move from drawings to paintings to prints. In this case, the source drawings were not a series but rather a loose collection of small singular works. Working off these drawings, Winters wished to expand their illusionistic and metaphorical spaces through the process of intaglio printing. This technique could advance his goals with its rich vein of procedures including etching, open bite, aquatint, soft ground, engraving and spitbite. By opening up his mark-making with minimal inks and the richness of etching techniques, he sought to discover new spatial possibilities in the drawings.

Azimuth, the title of the portfolio, refers to one of two angular coordinates that locate the positions of celestial bodies as viewed from a particular location and time. The word is from the Arabic for "direction." It was a critical measure that could be determined with instruments with origins in Western antiquity and the Islamic medieval period.

Richard H. Axsom in a new catalogue raisonné, Terry Winters: The Printed Work -