David Rich is an artist who has been painting and drawing for decades and, in preparation for a trip to New York, he had me print some cards.
I have known David for probably 20 years and his sensuous abstract paintings deserved a tasty treatment when it came to representing his large scale work in the small card format.
To that end, we chose a watercolor paper and then kept things fairly simple. The impression of the type sits in the impression of a discombobulated bar and adds yet another layer to the dimensionality of letterpress printing.
The idea of being able to do justice to David’s work on such a small graphic scale was a bit daunting at the onset but he was great to work with and we managed to bang out something that seems to have served him well.
Multi layered work for an artist of great complexity and yet concrete, as is necessary for a clean conveyance of information. Thanks David. Keep doing what you do.
It may be that, over the years, I have lost all perspective on what is good design. Perhaps I am just running on the joy that I experience standing at the press every day putting ink onto paper.
In the 1920s and 1930s there was a movement which, in retrospect, has been called the Harlem Renaissance. Having its origin in the Harlem neighborhood in New York City the movement has had far reaching effects.
As the elevated rumbles by overhead I step into the shade of the rail structure, its steel lattice flaking rust and decades of grey-green paint, and then down a half a story into the flower shop. A bell over the door sparkles audibly and welcomes me in.
Ok, usually I try to discourage people from including in their designs flood prints or large coverages of ink.
Here is a piece that I printed back in about 1898 after first carting our new Chandler and Price platen press up the hill to the print shop from the railway station. The color palate was all the rage that year and the cut was an electrotype block which I purchased from Messrs. Badoureau and Jones of Fleet Street in London.
This week NASA continues its attempt to get their rover free after it broke through the surface of a sheet of 190 pound blotter paper and got stuck. This photograph shows a detail of the paper’s surface as seen from the onboard camera.
Within the history of letterpress printing there has been, at its heart, a struggle to ride the line between light and heavy impressions. Too light an impression and the ink will not transfer well to the paper, while too much impression damages metal type (which, ideally, is to be laid back into the case and used again and again).