This adventure has been going on for a few years now, but it didn’t seem like much until about a year and a half ago. I finally made a letterpress plus linocut print that felt right.
I took a pretty long break from art after graduating with my BFA in printmaking. My thesis process was stressful and the program I was in was notorious for burning everyone out in the final year. (A lot of people went into construction work or mortuary school instead of continuing in anything creative.) I made things here and there. Illustration became my primary creative output: either ink wash or digital.
But I still missed printmaking. I just didn’t know what I wanted that to look like after graduation. In 2018, I decided to do something about it. I saw the documentary Pressing On and I learned letterpress was a little more accessible than I thought. No one in uni explained how you do printmaking outside of an academic setting. I knew some cities had printmaking spaces to work and there actually was a small one where I lived, but it wasn’t convenient. I wanted something in my own space.
I ordered a mystery press on eBay from Idaho. It wasn’t exactly what I expected or wanted, but it worked. (I’ll get into that story in another post.) It was a start. I learned more, I bought more, unpacked a lot of old heavy things, started a few small projects, had some false starts, and then finally I got that one print that was right.
During a call, the copywriter I was working with noted an unusual phrase used by one of the client stakeholders. He liked and I liked it too. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it, but it was the seed of something. And this is what came out:
It’s quite simple compared to the work I produced in art school, but it does what I want. My ideas about creativity and art changed after working as a designer for 10 years. The source and inspiration hasn’t changed, but again my career has changed the visual language rattling around in my head. There are more words now, but it’s all “grist for that mill.”
And I have a lotta ideas to grind out.
