The Fine Prints : * Lily Yu explores the self and Diane McBride the Earth in a show at New Canyon Gallery in Topanga.

The mystery and magic of the printmaking process have lured some artists into giving up painting and drawing.

Diane McBride of Woodland Hills discov ered the alchemy in printmaking 20 years ago, finishing a master’s degree at State University of New York at Stonybrook.

“Working in the studio, pulling a print off this plate, I was pinned by an electric jolt to that press,” she said, speaking figuratively. “I’d struggled with painting. It wasn’t quite right. I love metal, and I love line. I love the acids, the chemistry of printmaking--the interplay of the chemicals, the plate, your own skill and knowledge of chemistry, time and your own hand. Your idea is constantly being challenged by the chemical process of printmaking.”

West Los Angeles artist Lily Yu, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in studio art at Cal State Long Beach, took up printmaking a year ago. She had been drawing and painting.

“It was really an experiment,” she said. “You have this plate, the starting point. I love that moment where you peel off the paper from the plate and you peek at it, and the print is born. It is that magic moment. No matter how hard you try, each one is different because it’s a hand process. I love the idea of variation and possibility.”

McBride and Yu’s separate but complementary printmaking explorations of life below the surface can be seen at New Canyon Gallery in Topanga. The show is titled “Above and Below, Explorations of Self and Earth--Intaglio Etchings and Relief Prints.”

Yu employs various printmaking processes--woodcut, linoleum cut, aquatint etching, drypoint--in her series of self-portraits, which reveal her “innermost fears and insecurities,” she said. Though these prints delve into her psyche, “I feel with all my work I am speaking about women. In ‘Liberation of Dollface,’ I’m liberating myself and all women.”

This linoleum-cut print depicts a Yu of strong body and mind. Holding marionette-like strings that have been cut, she forthrightly faces the viewer, a bit of bravado in her stance.

“This piece has become more and more dear to me. I am more and more embodying the spirit of it. This image gives me courage,” she said.

Among her visions of self is the sculpture “Moving the Mechanical Dance.” Made from prints and “bits and pieces from my home,” she said, including chair-leg wheels and pieces of wood, this rendering from the waist down is almost all legs. It stands awkwardly on a small table, near a dance-step diagram.

“It’s about movement and balance, about recognizing the rules and trying to break away from them,” Yu said. Bothered by the fact that a print is only flat--”in the end, it’s just a piece of paper”--Yu has incorporated prints into this three-dimensional work in an effort to “push printmaking past its conventional form.”

McBride has chosen to break barriers in the content of her prints rather than in the printmaking process. “The image always has to be a little more important than the process,” she said.

Using the “very challenging” intaglio etching process, her imaginatively detailed views of life above and especially below the surface of the earth are “celebrations of the natural world,” she said. “My work is very connected with people within the land. The confrontation of the human situation and the natural world fascinates me.

“Wherever two edges meet, there’s energy, and that’s what interests me. Most of my work is done at the edge of humans peeking into the natural world. I love the layers of the earth, and I’m trying to image what might be under there.”

“Chrystie Street” in New York City conveys a sense of what we see above ground, and the “eons of life forms, plants and animals that lie underneath,” McBride said. For “Delancey Street,” she took the plate and etching tool to the Lower East Side and created her first line drawing there.

Within the layers of earth that she creates through her fine lines, one finds various bird, animal and human forms, especially if one looks closely at each print. Sandhill cranes inhabit her “Inland Sea.” Coyotes roam “Mojave,” her attempt “to learn the language of the desert,” she said. “In the desert, you see the bones, the structure of the earth.

“Each print is another question. I look for the answer in a subsequent print. Both Lily and I are searching. We’re constantly amazed by the visual world. The work is an attempt to find out what it’s about.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Above and Below, Explorations of Self and Earth--Intaglio Etchings and Relief Prints” by Diane McBride and Lily Yu.

Location: New Canyon Gallery, 129 S. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 24.

Call: (310) 455-3923.