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Stephen McMillan's 'Evening Reflections.'

In an old snapshot, printmaker Stephen McMillan stands grinning before a warren of condominiums near the UC Santa Cruz campus, under a street sign bearing his name.

The match is more than happenstance. Like other roads in the condo development, McMillan Drive was named for a Nobel laureate: the late nuclear scientist Edwin McMillan, Stephen’s father.

The younger McMillan, who studied art at UCSC in the 1970s, grew up in a household animated by curiosity about the way things work.

As if in tribute to this legacy, his landscape etchings — on exhibit at the Santa Cruz Natural History Museum through Aug. 4 — reveal not only attentiveness to the natural world, but a mind in search of a challenge.

For starters, McMillan’s chosen technique, aquatint etching, is one you’d expect of an artist who might have chosen a life in science.

His mastery of this technically complex printing method yields images whose accuracy astonishes fellow printmakers and misleads many first-time viewers.

"There’s hardly anybody I know of who’s willing to take the trouble to do aquatint anymore," said Anne Sawyer, owner of a Santa Fe gallery that has carried the artist’s work for more than 25 years.

"People are more inclined to do fast, easier photomechanical processes. People who know what they’re looking at fall on the floor when they see his work.

"Others stare and begin by asking whether it’s a photograph. They end up being blown away."

While other printing techniques produce contrasting areas of inked or blank paper, aquatint — like a watercolor painting or ink wash — allows the artist to produce tonal gradations from dark to light. McMillan exploits this subtlety to capture the play of light on water, the range of hues in a twilight sky or the deepening shadows in an Anasazi ruin.

The painstaking process begins with a photograph taken on one of McMillan’s frequent expeditions: a bicycle ride through the Sonoma County countryside near his Petaluma home, a backpack through High Sierra back country, a trip to Finland to visit friends.

Relying loosely on his photo as a guide, he draws the image freehand onto a rosin-coated copper plate, using a watercolor brush dipped in tarry, acid-resistant goo.

Between applications of this viscous medium, he subjects the plates to a series of acid baths, etching the unprotected portions in a scrimshaw-like pattern. Ultimately, the most deeply etched areas will hold the most ink, producing the most intensely colored areas in the finished print.

For a single print, McMillan may create up to four separately drawn and etched plates, each to be inked with a different color. He calculates in his head how much of each ink to use so that the hues will combine effectively in the finished image.

The influences of science on McMillan’s art go beyond technical wizardry.

A childhood home frequented by intellectual luminaries provided early training in the rational consideration of problems.

The first useful bit of art criticism he received came from nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, who saw one of 12-year-old Steve’s sketches of the San Francisco Bay as viewed from the family’s Berkeley Hills home.

Oppenheimer said he liked the drawing, but noted that the vegetation in the image looked "like spinach."

"He offered it as a neutral observation, without judgment," said McMillan. "It made me think more closely about my technique. I was impressed that a grown-up would make such a serious and helpful comment to a little kid."

At 16, McMillan won a prize in an international science fair for his speculations about the nature of space, drawing on both mathematics and imagination to envision a world beyond the third dimension.

A magazine ad for the oil company that sponsored the competition showed young Steve in 1966 — "cross-country track man, artist and explorer of worlds that do not exist" — staring out from behind the toothpick models he built to illustrate his ideas.

The same year, he had his first one-man show at a local library. One visitor wrote a congratulatory note to the senior McMillan, praising the young artist for "an extremely subtle line and a sense of organization.

"Your son explores many routes," continued the admirer, "and he always remains himself. His pictures are imaginative in the best sense of the term; they appear as true discoveries."

Considering the source, it’s not surprising that the artist still keeps a framed copy of the letter in his studio. It was signed by the photographer Ansel Adams.

In the spirit of that other master of two-dimensional landscapes, McMillan’s inspiration springs from his fascination with what he calls "magic" — the power of handmade images to evoke an experience of place.

"It’s fun to fool people," he said. "Part of being an artist is being a magician."

While he takes some pleasure in creating illusions through realism, he is fundamentally motivated by his fascination with patterns in nature, and by sensory engagement with landscapes that call to him.

He cites a print titled Oak Woodland. "It doesn’t really look like a photograph," he said.

"If you look closely, you see patterns and brushwork. It’s more like an abstract pattern. The labyrinth-like way the branches intertwine with each other is like a mosaic or a stained-glass window — pieces of color. I wouldn’t want it to look just like a photograph."

Jenifer Lienau, curator of his exhibit, said she was struck immediately by the power of McMillan’s landscapes to conjure an emotional response.

"When I showed one of his prints to the museum board," said Lienau, "I got a lot of gasps.

"Our mission at the Natural History Museum is to inspire people to make connections with the environment, in hopes that they will want to preserve it," she said. "Steve’s work is inspirational in that way."

Sarah Rabkin teaches writing in the Environmental Studies Department at UC Santa Cruz. Contact her at srabkin@cats.ucsc.edu

Information:

An exhibit of aquatint prints by Stephen McMillan.

Through Aug. 4.

Museum of Natural History, 1305 East Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz.

Info: 420-6115.

Many of Stephen McMillan’s prints can be viewed online at www.sonic.net/aquatint

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