For instance, Shakuntala Kulkarni, a Mumbai-based print-maker, brought her own litho press from a visiting Italian artist Roy Delgarno, but gave up due to health reasons. "First it was my hand and then my back," she narrates. "The doctor said I shouldn’t lift those stone any more."

Likewise Santiniketan-trained Kaushik Mukhopadhyay had a brief stint in the medium and moved on to installations, simply because he was disillusioned. "The problem with print-making is that there is far too much emphasis on technicality," he explains. "No one pays any attention to content. All people talk of is how to get a good aquatint..."

Aquatint is just one of five kinds of prints present-day artists commonly produced. The oldest is the woodcut, a technique that involves cutting of grooves into the wood, which in inked. Closely related to this is lino, wherein, instead of wood, a softer substance, linoleum is used for similar effect.

Then there is lithography, which literally means drawing on stone with water repellant ink. The fourth common process is etching with lines being drawn on a zinc plate, which is then immersed in an acid bath and inked. And finally, there is the aquatint, a method of etching by which multiple colours can be printed from one zinc plate.

Regardless of the technique applied, the absence of the elements of exclusivity robs a print of its value in relation to direct water colour or oil paintings. Print-makers have their own method of accounting for every print struck, but nobody can be ever sure.

"Not all artists take the responsibility for their limited editions of prints," says Mumbai-based Milind Limbekar, a well known print-maker. "I know of many artists who unnecessarily make multiple prints and spread them across galleries. Then the uniqueness of a creation is lost."

Modi concedes that this is a problem, but because of the nature of the medium, it cannot be helped. I’ve often heard buyers complaining of a print not being ‘original’since there is more of it in circulation. Now, if an artist comes out with limited editions, the buyer can still feel he is getting his money’s worth."

Yet another factor going against print-making is that the processes involve group effort. A print-maker cannot work in isolation, even as she might own a press. The collaborative experience that an art school studio provides is difficult to come by after one graduates.

Kolkata-based Tamal Mitra remembers making his last print at the Kanoria Art Centre in Ahmedabad five years ago. "I have making etchings because of manpower problems," he declares. "Linocut is relatively easy, but here too, I have to seek the convenience of my artist friends to be present as I work."

Nevertheless, there are die-hard printmakers like Kashinath Salve in Mumbai who has opened an Academy of Fine Art with the help of a printing press donated by painter Vrindava Solanki. The academy gives print-makers "the space for print-makers to congregate and collaborate with one another at work".

Then there is 75-year-old Vasant Parab, former Dean of J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, who discovered an abandoned printing press in the school’s godown. With it, he started conducting evening classes and today, the effort is being carried forward under the able guidance of another famous print-maker, Paul Coli.

But for these initiatives, printmaking would well have become history. MF