Finishing the prints

My study leave got off to a great start in early July when I was the Von Hess Visiting Artist at the Borowsky Center for Publication Arts at the University of the Arts here in Philadelphia. I worked with the fabulous Amanda D'Amico on an offset print that was - to me as a novice - rather complex. Today I finally finished the edition by signing the completed prints...Here are some photos from the process...

I set up camp at the Borowsky Center with my laptop and notes for the project. To be efficient in the limited amount of time we had, I knew I would have to do a lot of the work digitally so that I would have time to hand cut some of the stencils later in the process... 

The first few runs were very carefully selected yellows and reds. In all we did at least eight separate colors and innumerable runs of overprints of very transparent grays to adjust the relationships of values...

At the end of the second day of printing, it was beginning to look familiar to me...

Amanda D'Amico checking the color. 

One of my favorite parts of the process was cutting the rubylith stencils for the various grays we used to shade colors that had already been printed and to formulate the ground. This whole process has evidently been largely replaced by digitization, but there is something extraordinarily satisfying about directness of cutting the stencils...

...of course, it required that one think backwards and reverse positive and negative, so it was extremely complicated for me and underscored how much I have come to rely on the directness of my painting methods....

Checking the prints as we near completion.

Working with Amanda and the enormous Heidelberg press at the University of the Arts was a real treat. The press, with its breaths and rhythms, is an almost-living thing. Here is a some footage of it at work...

The conventions of signing prints are strange. I numbered the edition and signed it with the title I give the drawings. The complete text in the print reads, "Blessed are all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, and free us from the fetters of self." This has become something of a mantra in the studio...there are a few letters that are not formed correctly (M's are reversed from what they should be, and there is at least on funky A in there...)

I took fifty prints and the Borowsky Center kept 50 for its archive and its use. I also got a l the stages we pulled as we were working, which is an interesting timeline of the development of the final piece...