At the opening of the Kemper Museum “Backstage Pass” show last month, master printer Mike Sims of Lawrence Lithography Workshop invited me to design some images for him to publish. I made half a dozen designs for him and he selected “Jim”, a litho using six plates, three of various transparency white inks and three of various transparency black inks on mid-value paper.

I experimented with a number of possible paper colors and decided the Tan was most appropriate for the image, although likely too light — but I really wanted the paper (not ink) to establish the mid-values as it peeks through all the tiny spaces between lines and through the transparent inks used in four of the plates.

In order to create the mockups I actually created program files as though I were going to make these drawings on my CNC machine. Then I spent a few days writing a new program to convert my drawings into AutoCad DXF files which I loaded into Adobe Illustrator. This was VERY cool (to me) as it allowed me to experiment with various line thicknesses and transparencies and paper colors in order to optimize the films for the plates by ‘seeing’ accurate previews of the finished print before any plates had been burned or proofed.

I’d originally imagined we could ‘dye’ white paper a nice mid-gray using sumi or other water-based pigment — my thought here was to print lighter and darker inks so that the paper color becomes the mid-range of the image, the image being produced from cross hatched squiggley lines similar to my recent drawings.

I tested my paper-coloring idea and abandoned it as beyond me. LLW suggested printing the entire sheet gray, but that was unappealing to me… It’s important to me to maintain the ‘paper’ quality of the paper. So I tested the design, trying out various available papers and decided on Rives BFK Tan which is dark enough for the image and adds a very appropriate color.

In order to accomplish the drawings for the plates, I wrote some (very cool) code to prepare my squiggly lines for a local pre-press shop to produce films from which Mike Sims and the Lawrence Lithography Workshop folk could make the litho plates.

The films for the six plates arrived today and they are pretty spectacular, actually! WOW! I’m SO excited and happy to see these — and very satisfied to have more or less precipitated my ideas into ‘reality’ so directly and effortlessly! Here’s a photo showing Aaron Shipps (Tamarind Institute master printer and Mike Sims’ assistant) with some of the large film positives from which they’ll make the plates.

Plates were burned from the films yesterday (10-17-2007) and they turned out GREAT! Totally amazing to me what perfectly clear sharp lines appeared when the plates were developed. This is going to be a very successful print, I think, and the scale is terrific. VERY exciting, and very gratifying that Lawrence Lithography is investing such an enormous amount of time and money in publishing my work!

Printing should begin on Monday!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xErK0bJhcqg

October 25-26, 2007 — first proofs of “Jim”

The BFK paper has turned out to be too light in value to provide the mid-values the image requires. We’re considering various measures to darken the paper… Tea-staining the BFK Tan to make the paper darker overall, printing a flat over the entire sheet, printing a 7th plate in a mid-value under the image (I’ve produced an image for film to accomplish that, but that method is pretty far afield from my ‘pure’ concept of lightening and darkening the paper through cross-hatched squiggles, so I’d much prefer either finding or producing a darker paper than under-printing the 7th plate…

The proof above might be the direction we follow for the print. In this one, a silhouette in dark brown was printed on top of the mokuhanga style woodgrain printing, then the six blocks in whites and blacks was printed on top. Today, I’ll run over to LLW to print four more sheets in a similar fashion, but a bit darker, and we’ll try to eliminate the silhouette plate. The middle black in the print above was TOO transparent, I think, and didn’t pop properly, so we’ll try to fix that as well. Lots of work ahead before it’s ready for editioning!

Photos from the ‘print signing’ party April 13, 2008:

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!!! What a great week we had, and I congratulate you all for having designed, carved, and successfully printed Japanese technique woodblock prints! WOW! YOU DID IT! Janis — I’m SO sorry you fell ill the 2nd day — hope you’re all well now and that you’ll be able to finish up the next time I visit Connecticut? Special thanks to our host, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, CCP director and master printer, Tony Kirk, and staff Chris, Heather, Jackie, and everyone else who made it so easy for us all to be together!

I hope you don’t mind that I’ve edited two little movies from our time together — one with very brief cuts from the introductions you each made (sorry that I’ve surely left out some very important stuff here)… At the end of the introduction movie is what little we captured of baren-cover-tieing — sorry my camera filled up before I finished, but maybe this’ll get you started? I’ll film it start to finish the next time I re-cover my baren so you can remember how to do it yourself! The second movie contains some shots of each of you working on SOMEthing, and I’ve also included a slideshow with a bunch of little photos I nabbed of you your prints. Carol and Su — you guys were gone before I was able to photograph your prints — send me some scans and I’ll add them! Hope you enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnfSZZDKT_Y

(introductions and preparation of takenokawa for baren cover)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ocw7fjdst_Y

(workshop participants at work)

I Submitted five of each to the competition. The juror, print collector Reba White Smith, did not jury my prints into the show. Anthony (Tony) Kirk, director of the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, wrote me the kindest rejection letter and asked me to telephone him.

Tony is head of the etching department at Ken Tyler’s famous Tyler Graphics. He is a master printer and has collaborated with major American artists and taught printmaking at a number of universities. On the phone, Tony told me that he was very disappointed that my prints weren’t juried into the show, as he had awarded my print, “Dana”, the Director’s Award. And he emailed me the following:

During our exhibitions I always put together an educational display relating to the current exhibition. We have two glass vitrine cabinets for this and they are placed in the corridor leading from the gallery to the main print studios. I am going to place there some miniature prints from my own collection including a woodcut by George Roualt and a wood engraving by Thomas Bewick. I would like to buy your woodcut of the standing female nude and include it in this display. I was wondering if you could send me a description of your technique and the blocks so that I could include them in the display. <…> I already have two other artist members of our center who have expressed an interest in buying it. Even although it is not included in the juried show, I am confident that I can sell several impressions for you.

Let us hope that when the next miniature print competition rolls around in two years that your submissions will be juried in and that you receive the awards that your work merits. Meanwhile I am very pleased to own one of your works. Please send the material for the display case to my attention at <…>

We will soon be planning our summer workshop brochure which will include a week long workshop in hanga printmaking by artist in residence Paul Furneaux, the artist whose studio/workshop was destroyed in the Edinburgh fire. Perhaps you would be interested in doing a similar workshop in the fall/winter or in spring 2004?

Isn’t that just the nicest rejection you’ve ever seen?!? So it turns out that all three prints will be on display, with their blocks, and with a description of my process and one or two photos of me working. Go figure!

Carved Apallachian cherry wood blocks and printed on Baren Mall Yamaguchi Hosho paper (very nice!). Thirty sheets printed for each print. Completed January, 2003 in about two and a half days of carving and printing.

These are reduction prints, printed by hand using Traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques and materials (except, of course for the reduction part). For the various shades of blue which make up each print, I’d carve each block a bit, print each sheet, carve each block a bit more, print each sheet again a little darker, etc, etc, etc.

"Embedded Self Portraits", 1996, deeply embossed four color Lithograph on Rives BFK paper, image about 14" x 19".

I love looking at all the incredible (and sometimes funky) variation among the small portraits…