For those of you who aren’t familiar with the terms, serigraphs are prints produced by the silkscreen process. (In latin, sera means silk and graph means print.) Giclées are prints produced by an extremely fine mist of inks onto the paper. (In French, giclée means a fine mist or spray.) If a print is a limited edition, it means there re only a set number of prints, signed and number by me.
In Latin, litho means stone and graph means print. Most all commercial printing has been traditionally done on big commercial presses with metal printing plates. Although now, much printing is done digitally. At any rate, all of the vintage open edition prints I did were printed by the lithographic process.
In the late 1800’s, lithography was invented. One prepred the artwork by drawing or painting an image on a slab of limestone with a greasy pencil or greasy ink. The image was then etched into the stone with an acid liquid. In order to ink up the greasy image before printing, the stone was first wetted down with water. Water and grease repel each other so the ink only adhered to the greased-up image. Paper was placed on the stone and then run through the press, leaving the image on the paper.
The technology has changed significantly, of course, but the water and greasy ink aspect of the process still exists today. Some of my all-time favorite artists--such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen-- are from the period when lithographs first appeared in the late 1800’s.
Many people have said the quality of my vintage lithographic open edition prints is comparable to the superior quality of serigraphic printing (printing by the silk screen process). That’s because I generally don’t do regular lithographic printing which only used 4 special inks which are superimposed in a certain pattern over each other on the final printed piece, to create all the colors you see. It really is sort of amazing how this works. If you use a magnifying glass to look at, say, the color cover of a magazine, you’ll see just the 4 ink colors in a dot pattern that creates thousands of colors. Most all of my vintage open edition prints used solid ink colors, however. I would have the printer specially mix each color I wanted in my print. So most of my prints don't have the little dots. Sometimes my prints had up to 10 colors A more complicated and difficult way to print, for sure, but it gives a much richer look. |
You’ll see the mention of an artist’s embossed “chop” in the descriptions of many of my limited editions and in several of my posters. If you’ve ever seen Chinese and Japanese prints or paintings, you can see the little red blocks in one corner with characters in them. I really like adding little details like my chops because it’s just a little something the viewer can discover maybe not at the first glance and so it can be a little surprise to delight the eye. Design-wise, I just enjoy adding things like that. It makes the whole image more interesting to me. I always do a plants or an animal or a bug. On another note, the chops sort of remind of opening a new window on an Advent calendar. A little soupcon of a surprise.
Not too many print artists do this on their prints, especially in the size I’ve done them in the past . (It’s me being a bit of a maniac.) Since art school, I’ve loved the contrast of the matte colors of the ink next to the shiny foils or foil stamping or even of gold or silver leafing, which is what I did on my paintings in art school. In foil stamping, a metal die is made in the shape and size of the image I want to be foiled. That die is heated and pressed against the foil onto the paper leaving the foiled image. This process is always done after the inks have been put down on the paper.
Anybody out there not know what woodblock prints are? A woodblock print is where one cuts a design into a block of wood. Actually, the artist cuts AWAY the parts of the wood that they don’t want to print so that the image is in relief and the rest is carved away. You’re left with a block of wood with your image carved onto one side. The block is then inked up and printed. I don’t actually produce my prints with the woodblock method. Rather, I’m inspired by historical woodblocks from Japan, primarilly, but also by Medieval botanical art.
This simply means an unlimited quantity of prints. These prints are generally more affordable because they are printed in larger quantities |
