New Delhi: Outside, the weekend afternoon drifts by in a familiar haze. The traffic has thinned, the sun hangs heavy, and the city seems to have agreed, briefly, to slow down. Inside a room at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), nothing does.The moment the door opens, movement replaces the lull. Hands are already at work — wiping, scratching, dipping, pressing — never pausing long enough to rest. The air is thick with the smell of ink and metal, with something faintly burnt. Tables are crowded with long white sheets that resemble neither finished artworks nor blank surfaces, but something suspended in between.At one end of the room, artist Rm. Palaniappan leans over a zinc plate darkened to a dull black. He is not drawing on it. He is drawing into it. A fine needle cuts through the surface with a soft, stubborn sound. The line does not appear in ink; it is carved out of resistance. “You start somewhere and you end somewhere,” he says, eyes fixed on the plate. “The journey is the work.”A few feet away, another artist lowers his plate into a shallow bath. The liquid looks harmless. It is not. Nitric acid begins its quiet work, biting into the exposed lines. There is no splash, no spectacle — just time and patience. “This is etching,” Palaniappan says, almost as a reminder.Nearby, someone works ink into barely visible grooves, palms stained, cloth moving in slow circles. At the press, Hanuman Kambli places the inked plate on the bed, lays a sheet of damp paper over it, then covers it with felt. The wheel turns. The machine resists for a moment, then yields with a low, heavy sound.When the paper is lifted, the room leans in.An image has appeared — not drawn, not painted, but pressed out of metal.This is the rhythm inside NGMA’s newly launched printmaking studio, its first-ever dedicated space for the medium, opened under the leadership of director general Dr Sanjeev Kishor Goutam. In the days ahead, this rhythm is expected to deepen as the studio slowly finds its own pace.Kambli studies the print for a moment. Something is off. He does not explain. Instead, he reaches for another tool and begins polishing the plate again. “There are many needles, many tools,” he says. “I’ve spent my life doing this.”The print goes back into the process. Nothing here is final.Across the room, conversations drift in and out. Artists compare notes. Someone mentions how a single work can take days. Artist NG Bagodi Vijay speaks about adding layers, sometimes even burning resin to build texture. Each print carries time inside it.“Printmaking is not merely a technique. It is a philosophy of multiplicity, accessibility and experimentation,” Goutam says. The studio — with its custom-built press modelled on a rare machine from Visva-Bharati University — is as much about revival as it is about reinvention.“This is just the start. We plan to launch a three-month programme for art enthusiasts and explore future collaborations with Indian and international artists,” says Goutam.The inaugural workshop, ‘Chhapankan’, which concluded on Saturday, saw artists coming together from across the country, each carrying their own language of lines, textures and time.As Ananda Moy Banerji puts it, “From a polished zinc plate to a finished print, the process is a quiet dialogue between artist and material, where lines are drawn through resistance, bitten by acid into permanence, filled with ink, and finally pressed into paper.”Meanwhile, back in the room, the wheel turns again. Another sheet is lifted. Another image emerges.
