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Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Kathan Brown's Remarkable Journey a review of Kathan Brown's Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press Buy this book at Amazon.com by Roxane Gilbert All Rights Reserved |
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At an auction planning meeting for a Bay Area art college, one of the committee members,
a trustee of the college, said, "Let's not accept any prints for the auction. We
should only solicit donations of original works of art." There were a few heads
nodding among the 10 or so people seated around the big wooden conference table. Then
the chairman of the committee (a gallery owner and also a trustee of the college)
spoke up. "Prints are original works of art." In Kathan Brown's book Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press (Chronicle Books; 286 pages; $45) she addresses this unfortunate confusion about prints immediately. "That's why I like the idea of calling fine art prints multiple originals, and I try to remember to use the word impression rather than copy when I talk about prints." (Emphasis is the author's.) For this bit of information alone, the book should be recommended reading for any art student, and required reading for every trustee of an art college. Kathan Brown started Crown Point Press in 1962 in a storefront in Richmond, California. The startup money for the "workshop" came from the sale of three large editions of Brown's own etchings. Her first press was "a pile of rusting gears and metal parts" that she discovered in the backyard of a rooming house in Edinburgh, Scotland. The landlady made it a gift to Brown, who brought it to San Francisco as baggage on a freighter. A printmaker who has editioned for other artists has the unique opportunity to learn to see through another's eyes. After more than 30 years of publishing prints, Kathan Brown has a wealth of technical expertise and artistic insight, which she imparts simply and unpretentiously. There is no assumption that the reader has even a basic understanding of the printing process, and each step is clearly explained. She also takes care to explain the artist's motivation for creating a particular image. Richard Diebenkorn first worked at Crown Point Press in 1962. Initially he worked in drypoint, a process of scratching directly into a metal plate with a hard needle. "'What I want is to be doing something, not making something,' he said." Brown took that as a maxim. She states, "It focuses on the means rather than the end. I think this is a secret of successful art making." Although Crown Point only produces intaglio and relief prints, the book contains explanations and visual examples of all of the basic printmaking media. Silkscreen is presented as " the modern and commercially viable form of stencil printing." We are told how to recognize this type of print, and why it looks the way it does. Andy Warhol used silkscreen for commercial purposes in the 1950's, and in the 1960's his use of this medium played an important role in the development of Pop Art. Wayne Theibaud's 1971 color silkscreen Nine Lipsticks, printed by Fleming Silkscreen of Sacramento, California, is shown as an example of a Pop Art print. Brown describes the planographic process, and shows two examples. The first is Diebenkorn's 1985 lithograph, Greyland, editioned at Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles, and the second is Thiebaud's 1990 lithograph Bow Ties, printed at Trillium Graphics in Brisbane, California. It is Brown's fear that the modern technical sophistication of lithography makes it easy for a printer to lose the involvement of the artist. "...The professional skills that make reproductive printing so excellent can undermine fine art lithography." It is that involvement with the artists that gives value to Brown's experience, above and beyond her technical accomplishment. When she describes various buildings that Crown Point has occupied, it is obvious that each space has had relevance to her personally. The relevance of the space becomes interesting when she describes its impact on the way the artists work. Brice Marden, a lifelong resident of the New York City area, made prints at Crown Point Press when the studio was in Oakland. "Down the street was the I. Magnin building, an Art Deco rectangle made entirely of green ceramic tiles." Upon seeing Brown in New York in 1971, not long after their first project together, Marden inquired "How's the I. Magnin Building?" In 1979 he made a sugar lift aquatint at Crown Point, Tile 1. In 1986, after 15 years in Oakland, Crown Point moved to a bright, sunny loft on Folsom Street in San Francisco. Brown says that the 1988 aquatint by Tony Cragg, Laboratory Still Life No. 1, "exemplifies the feeling of Folsom Street to me: ordered, confident, optimistic." As any Californian knows, a 10-year lease provides for only so much stability. The Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, severely damaged the Folsom Street building. Before the city bureaucrats could get around to condemning and padlocking the place, the staff of Crown Point Press moved equipment, prints and furnishings to temporary storage. The office staff and the prints ended up in the basement of the Ansel Adams Center for Photography for nearly a year. Within a couple of months of the earthquake, Brown purchased the building at 657 Howard, from where Crown Point Press currently operates. The history of Crown Point Press unfolds as you make your way through Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood , but the book is also neatly structured to add layers of information about printmaking technique. All the while, synopses of the backgrounds, philosophies and stylistic leanings of the artists function as the engine moving the story. A printmaker, particularly one who works in the intaglio processes, could learn a great deal about specific techniques. There is drypoint, soft ground and hard ground etching, aquatint, sugar lift, spit bite, photo etching, gravure, soap ground.... All of these techniques, and more, have been used and explored by artists and their printers at Crown Point Press. You could simply start at the table of contents and delve into a chapter that details your area of interest. But it is Brown's herself that provides the structural fiber of this story. From her early experience in 1964, working with Wayne Thiebaud, we see her as a head-strong, clearly focused young woman. She admonishes Thiebaud when she sees him copying from a photograph of one of his paintings of a piece of lemon meringue pie onto a small etching plate. "'Printmaking should be original,' I said. 'What's the point of copying yourself, of redoing something that's already been done?'" Thiebaud picked up another etching plate and made a drawing of something else. Later he explained to Brown that in revisiting the painting in another medium, he was trying to discover something. "Would the same composition work in fine lines, in black and white, and in a small size? Was 'it' in the composition? Or was 'it' in the paint, the color, the surface?" Brown learns a lot from the people she works with, and reveals these insights, without embellishment, to the reader. Appendix I, Collecting Prints, contains some of the most thought-provoking passages she has written. She explains the "three character traits I think all good artists have. To describe them, I'm going to borrow three of John Cage's favorite words: intention, indeterminacy, and discipline." Intention can best be determined by looking at a body of work by the artist and, if possible, reading the artist's own explanations of the work. Then ask yourself these questions: What is the artist exploring? Does the artist love art enough to explore its history? Are original ideas presented? The second characteristic, indeterminacy, is even more abstract. It is a call for ambiguity. Brown says, "If an artist's state of mind is indeterminate, even though his or her intention is clear, the possibilities for that artist are unlimited." The last characteristic, discipline, is the one about which we can least kid ourselves. While discipline might not be obvious in a developing artist, in the mature artist, it is reflected through sustained productivity over the course of a lifelong career. Interestingly, the quality of discipline is cited by Brown as the characteristic the print collector should consider in an artist when making the determination of whether a print is an original or a signed reproduction. Presumably, the disciplined artist will have been so prolific that making reproductions of his or her own work would undermine his/her market for original art. In any event, educating oneself is the best defense against making a mistake in print collecting. It is also sound advice to those who might some day sit on the board of trustees of an art college. |
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Comments? updated September 28, 2004 |
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