PRINTED MATTER
When I started making prints as a young brown punk rock boy. It was the intersection of questioning authority and creative practice that drew me to making work.
Ive been seeing a strong connection to not just the images that I have printed, but how I have printed them. I have an entire area in my studio dedicated to print making. But I don't think of myself as a ‘printmaker’, and if you have been to my studio, it’s not what a real ‘printmaker’ studio looks like. My print shop and my approach to producing prints is based on how easy and fast I can crank out the multiples.
Printing for me is beyond just the reproduced image, it is how the print was created. Focusing on what pressures were involved, how the various collaborations with nature, portraiture, and text came about. But more importantly how the prints are distributed.
I’ve got a C&P platen press and a Vandercook sp15 that can fire up chingos de prints with a good woodcut lockup. But it is my homemade screen printing press that I’ve had for over 20 years that has pulled lord knows how many prints. Recently I’ve been just cuttin’ blocks and using just a hand barren. Printmaking is where I started from, the beauty has always been in the creative process of making the matrices, but it is the distribution that makes me wanting to make more.
