About the Prints...

Lithographs

In 1984 I had the opportunity to do my first lithograph, a six color print in collaboration with Jack Lemon, master printer at Landfall Press in Chicago. Since then I have done three other multi-color lithographs, one with Fred Gude at Four Brothers Press in Chicago, one with Dan Gualdoni at Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis, and the most recent one with collaborative printer Nick Karvounis at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring, MD.

The first three prints were all done with the traditional lithographic process. They were each six colors, drawn in reverse on a combination of aluminum ball grain plates and litho stones, printed in the traditional lithography process. The recently completed Pyramid Atlantic print was seventeen colors drawn on mylar, printed in a photo litho process which allows you to draw directly without reversing the image.

All of the prints were based loosely on previously completed paintings. The great challenge in doing them was to imagine and then create the color separations from an existing image which is made up of complex, mixed colors. In doing this difficult task the comparison that came to mind was a musical one: drawing each color plate was like trying to single out a particular instrumental part from hearing a fully developed symphony. You have to unpeel from the blended sound the specific role of each contributing part.

The visual process is even more difficult than the musical one, however, for the following reason. In the case of the symphony, it is only when you hear the completed work that all the parts are overlaid, as the music is written originally for each part separately. In the case of the lithograph, the paintings are created originally with all the colors completely mixed; it is never either conceptualized or seen as individual colors layered one over the other.

Such color separation can be done photographically in the four color process used in commercial printing. It can also be done digitally with a computer. But both cases rely on the four color process of cyan, magenta, yellow and black. The intuitive and intellectual process which uses no mechanical aids permits the layering of all kinds of other colors. Its excitement lies in the difficulty of the challenge.

Iris Prints

I have also had the opportunity to do three Iris Prints with David Adamson, master printer at Adamson Editions in Washington, DC. These were all based on the previously completed large scale charcoal and pastel, multi-panel drawings from the Bare Bones series. The challenges of this process were different from those of lithography. Here the translation from one medium to another involved making small scale images on single sheets of paper from what were originally large scale images made up of many panels hanging separately and irregularly on a wall. Major adjustments were demanded by the new medium. The resulting prints are unique images and not simple replications or miniaturizations of original drawings.