Peter is a graduate of the ANU Printmedia and Drawing Workshop and his special subject was wood engraving, mixed up with bone prints and stump rubbings. He’s an outdoorsy sort of dude, likes to pick up odd bits of wood and bits of fungi on his bush meanderings and prints from them. He keeps a blog (called Art Out and About) that can tell you a lot more about his work, and which hopefully will get used a lot while he is overseas doing a residency in California in Aug/Sept/Oct 2011.

When we started talking about his residency, he had no idea about what text to use, and he’s not much of a poetry reader. I’d just come back from New Zealand loaded with new poetry books and experiences of meeting poets in the wild. I’d been introduced to a poet called Brian Turner who wasn’t part of my posse of Otakou poets, but who had impressed me with his love of the landscape and his intolerance of fools. I was introduced to him before I’d seen an excellent poem of his in the local paper, and before I’d bought his latest volume of poems, Just This, so I didn’t get a chance to admire his work to his face. Soon after I bought his book, it won the NZ Book of the Year poetry section for 2010.

So I threw Brian’s book and David Campbell’s Collected (DC was a fine Australian poet who wrote primarily of the local Canberra/Monaro region) at Pete and sent him away. Brian won, and so we had a text, his poem ‘Sky’. It was delight to write to Brian asking him permission to reproduce the poem and to tell him what I thought of him, and even more of a delight that he readily gave us permission.

Time slipped by, but I knew the project was brewing, and Pete and I saw each other regularly at his workplace, Megalo, and at various openings, so there was always a chance to discuss progress. Finally we found a time to work together, mostly impelled by his impending residency deadline.

Pete had the idea of combining a manufactured wood engraving block (made of small blocks of boxwood joined together to make a larger block) with print from a found piece of wood. The poem ponders over what the sky would do if it could observe what we humans get up to down here, and so there are two levels of image: the natural sky and the human-meddled earth.

In Pete’s composition, the ‘sky’ is actually the manufactured block, and the ‘ground’ is the natural print. We have used a combination of Baskerville and Imprint Outline for the text, and the paper is Iwaki washi, which is a lovely light and yellowy paper that makes black ink look stunning.

The broadside is now editioned and ready to sell — it is a limited edition of no more than 50, so if you would like a copy, get in touch quickly, as I think it will sell fast. The details and price are listed at the foot of this post.

But first, some images:

This is the piece of log that Pete has painstakingly cut & mounted, ready to be hand-printed. It was too big to fit on the press! He worked out a process of folding the foot of the sheets to mask off bits of the log, which we then cut off before printing the rest on the press.

Here he is, in Studio Duck, folding a test piece before hand-printing it. You can’t tell, but it was very cold in the studio that day.

Here are the offcuts. We are going to take half each, and see what we each come up with.

This is the wood engraving block, exquisitely engraved, but not inked. While I set up the press and type and pulled some proofs, Pete prepared paper and continued hand-printing his log.

The text and the block, locked up in a chase on the press, ready to roll (see, I can use a cliche here and it actually MEANS something).

Oops! The block was too high here, there are bits showing that are unwelcome. We have packed little slips of paper under parts of the block, but there are obviously too many. It’s amazing the difference a small piece of bond paper makes.

We adjusted the packing, and the block printed perfectly. We used Neil Wallace Wood Engraving Ink, it’s lovely and stiff on the press. We had to touch up the type slightly with a hand roller at each pass, but that is so much easier, quicker and more accurate than faffing with the block each time.

Woo hoo! The print up on the pinboard at bon a tire stage (ready to print). We are jubilant. Pete stayed up late that night finishing the log prints at Megalo.

A couple of days later, the log prints are almost dry (such oily ink takes a long time to dry in Winter, so these are touch dry, but if you rub them, they smear) and we can edition what is on the press.

The more good ones we print, the happier we are.

Once we’d printed what we thought was enough (we’re not sure how many will make it to the final edition, but we managed about 60 all up), Pete pulled an edition of just the cloud, for his exhibition.

So. Here are the broadside details:

Peter McLean, Sky, 2011.
Poetry by Brian Turner, from Just This (NZ: Victoria University Press, 2009)
Wood engraving, letterpress and direct print from found wood on Iwaki washi (paper).
c. 505 x 234mm
Edition of c. 50
$100 each plus postage & handling

These broadsides will be available at the Duckshop from late July, but if you would like to pre-order, please email ampersandduck {at} gmail {dot} com.

(There are still copies of Natalie Azzopardi’s Game Over series available to buy as well!)

I was one of the Called, and I designed and printed some very little letterpress broadsides. I didn’t have a lot of time to work on them, as I was preparing to travel to NZ to make some much bigger broadsides. Funnily enough, printing small is just as tricky, maybe even more so, than printing big. So the edition sizes for each poster varies. And there’s one series of images, and then a few fun ones that just begged to be made.

If you’d like to see the process of putting the exhibition together, and all the wonderful studio visits made by Anna-Maria to the craftspeople involved, here’s a link to all of her posts on the subject.

THE SERIES

These letters do not spell anything out deliberately; they were chosen to go with the images, which are little metal ornaments that I bought from eBay years ago. Feel free to make them spell things; Anna-Maria made them spell R&D in the show, others may want the word FORD, or maybe your name is DROF. Heh. The letters are 72pt Gill Sans, printed in a bright sexy red. All have little hand-filed deckles at the head and tail, and are numbered and signed.

Each of these is 45 x 32 mm in dimension, so you’re probably looking at them at a larger scale (which won’t do them any favours).

They’re not really meant to be lined up together, so I didn’t put a lot of effort into making the height of AMPERSAND DUCK match up. I designed each one as an individual, taking into account the balance of each image on the ‘page’.

Edition numbers are:

D: Dragonfly — 20

O: Owl — 20

R: Rat — 20

&: Ampersand — 10

F: Frog: 20

They are all still available.

THE OTHERS

Speaks for itself.

45 x 32mm, in an edition of 9. Still available.

Hammer Time. Hand-coloured.

55 x 32mm. Edition of 6. Still available.

Almost Ace. I just love this one. In amongst a box of miscellaneous letterpress stuff was this tiny little logo with the letters ACF, and I’ve looked at it for years wondering if anything could be done with it or should I just chuck it. One day… BING! I saw the way forward.

Printed on red Japanese washi, 42 x 30mm. Edition of 11. Still available.

All of these broadsides are Aus$15 each plus p&h.

My brief was to print a folio of broadsides, or posters, using a poem each from four Australian and three New Zealand poets, in an edition of 100. (The ’4′ was an accident, and the running joke is that it takes four Australian poets to make three NZ poets.) I had the run of the Otakou Press typefaces, including a wonderful collection of wood types, and the choice of their three presses: a Vandercook cylinder proofing press, a small Albion press, and a large Columbian iron press, all of which were only set up for hand printing.

This is the result. The pages are printed on Fabriano Rosapina 220gsm, and the folio cover was designed by myself in collaboration with the University of Otago Bindery, and constructed by the bindery.

The folio cover.

The title page

‘The Sibyl’s Avenue’, by Australian poet Robert Adamson.

‘Sight-Reading’, by Australian poet Stephen Edgar.

‘The Piano’s Birthday’, by NZ poet Michael Harlow.

‘Night Sonnet’, by Australian poet Sarah Holland-Batt.

‘At the Opera’, by Australian poet Les Murray.

‘…If you like’ (untitled), by NZ poet Vincent O’Sullivan. This is a very difficult image to scan, as it is printed very transparently, so this is a photo taken from an angle, unlike the other images in this post.

‘No String Banjo’, by NZ poet Sue Wootton.

If you would like to purchase a copy (although they are nearly sold out), please contact Donald Kerr, Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago Library: donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz.

I have written about the printing process further here, plus there is more writing on my personal blog for the months of August and September, 2010. There is also an interview with me on Dunedin community television here, and for a short time there is a Radio NZ interview on The Arts on Sunday for the 17th of October here.

The residency fell into my lap, through the generosity of master printer Alan Loney, who took it upon himself to introduce me to Donald Kerr, the Otago University Special Collections Librarian, when we were all at a conference in Brisbane called The Limits of the Book. Donald has custodianship of a wonderful collection of printing equipment, originally established as a bibliography teaching aid, and while continuing to be used as such, has also become a press in its own right: the Otakou Press. Established in 2003, it hosts an annual short-term printer in residence who produces a work that is sold – and usually sold out before the project is finished – and funds the next PIR the next year. The residency is now totally self-funded, and includes travel, accommodation (which includes food) and a stipend.

Donald and I had wonderful talks in Brisbane, about letterpress, the history of the equipment, and his liking of posters. Up to now all the printers had been New Zealanders, men, and had made books. Time for a change! We decided that I would be the 2010 PIR, and we would make posters, preferably using some of the wood type in the collection, which had scarcely been utilised.

We decided to have six poets, three from NZ and three from Australia. Donald picked out some names and emailed them all to see if they were amenable. Peter Porter and Les Murray were on his list, but PP died soon after, and we didn’t hear from Les, so we ended up with Vincent O’Sullivan, Michael Harlow and Sue Wootton batting on the NZ side, and Robert Adamson, Sarah Holland-Batt and Stephen Edgar for the Aussie side.

And then Donald got a letter in the post from Les, who doesn’t do computers. He’d LOVE to be in it. And, we both agreed, you can’t say no to Les. So. We had SEVEN poets, and I just didn’t have the time in the residency to add an extra NZer – seven was going to be pushing it. Did I mention that my edition is to be 100 of each, plus title page and colophon? That’s 900 pages, over a period of six weeks.

There was only so much planning I could do beforehand, since I hadn’t seen the type selection: read the poems (each poet sent a small selection of small, in most cases unpublished, poems to choose from) and select one for each, and make notes about what each inspired visually when I read them. We’d decided upon paper stock, and ordered it: Fabriano Rosapina, a lovely thick white Italian paper, that would need to be hand-torn into quarter-sheets.

The poems I picked didn’t seem to have any connecting theme, apart from my liking them, so I decided to go with the idea that their number inspired and call the folio PRIME, playing with the idea of seven as a prime number and also that these are poets in their prime. Since then I have realised that the connection is one of process (in the use of wood type) and that the title could have reflected that, but I’m happy with Prime.

Then

Arriving at the University of Otago, settling in to my digs at the very comfy St Margaret’s College, and getting to know my way around were all the easy things to do at the start of my residency. Dunedin is beautiful, even in the depth of winter, and surprisingly warmer than Canberra, owing to what everyone says is a mild winter. The big learning curve was tackling the presses in the print room…

I am used to printing with a cylinder flatbed letterpress, which has built-in rollers that ink the type and can be adjusted to stay at a level that rolls the type the same way every time. Here in Dunedin, they have iron hand-presses only, which means that the printer has to hand-roll the ink onto the type every time they pull a print.

The up side of that is that you can print multiple colours at once. The down side is that you have to develop a good technique of rolling sensitively to the type’s needs, and evenly, and neatly. Every time. And I had to learn how to do it FAST, because there were those 900 pages to print, and time was ticking.

I’m talking in the past tense here, but as I write I’m still in the thick of it. I’m nearly halfway through my third week of the residency, and I’m only 300 pages in…

This is the Columbian press, the grand madam of the room. She’s my press of choice from the three available to me, with her bobbing eagle counterweight and decorative dragons. I had a crash course in using her, including how to make my own brown-paper tympans and friskets.

The fact that I have to hand-roll the type, lower the frisket then the tympan, roll the bed under the platen and then pull the press handle for every. single. print. means that I am physically limited as to how intricate and/or layered these prints can be. I need to design them to be striking without being overly hard to produce.

I am also limited by the colours available to me. I can mix colours, but that means I also have to judge how much mixed ink I need for a print run, and the amount of ink varies according to how much surface area there is on the type; wood type is generally broad-surfaced and thirsty, whereas metal type is smaller and finer, needing finer layers of ink rolled with a lighter touch. When I first arrived, I only had blue, red, yellow, black and a transparent mixing white, but an ex-commercial printer who now works at the Uni of Otago library brought in a gift of some pristine tins of Pantone colours: a variety of reds (rhodamine, rubine, warm red, all fabulous and important distinctions when mixing colours), a green, orange and a good dense rich black that does not shade into grey like most offset blacks. A most welcome gift, and one I’m using gratefully.

The other limitation, or maybe I should say, addition to the palette of choices, is the type itself. The Otakou press has a house font, Garamond, which is one I use extensively in my studio as well. So there is a healthy amount of that, plus a number of drawers of assorted fonts like Gill, Imprint Shadow, Plantin, Gothic Condensed, but not in any great quantity or variety of sizes. There is also a lot of very beautiful wood type, in many sizes (wood type is measured in ‘lines’ but I don’t know what ‘lines’ actually means).

So, to print a poem as a poster, no matter what my idea is, I have to find a font that not only suits the feel of the poem, but also has enough characters in the drawer to set the whole poem and whatever I want to use around the page. I had to count every character in every poem and make a chart of the alphabet needs so that for each layout I can make sure that I can make the poem before I get halfway through and discover that there aren’t enough Hs or something. And you know poets… they tend to use strings of words with the same letters, even if they aren’t conscious that they’re doing it (I don’t even mean alliteration or rhyme… I mean just repetitions of letters generally).

My first attempt was a shape poem by NZ poet Sue Wootton, called No Strings Banjo. Donald thought that this would be one of the hardest poems to tackle, but actually, making a shape in letterpress is fairly easy if you stick to the basic principles of keeping all the lines the same length and making a shape within a block, like building pixels.

This turned into this:

Please excuse the torn base and the handwriting; this was my bon-a-tirer (good to print) reference copy for editioning purposes.

I didn’t know that Sue was from Dunedin until she walked into the studio for a peek, and to my delight she was delighted with the layout, and adored the Fancy Western wood type as much as I do.

I wasted a lot of paper on that first edition, until I worked out my rolling technique. Donald forgave me, as he knew I’d been chucked in at the deep end. I thought the edition printed ok finally, but I know that by the time I get to the end of the residency, I’ll look back at the quality of this first run and shudder.

The next batch, because I had such a clear picture in my head of the print, was Les Murray’s At the Opera. Donald wanted COLOUR, and so I decided to give him some red, a good patchy red velvet curtain of a large wooden M.

Like this one, all rolled up and ready to print as this:

Another thing that Otakou Press has in abundance are wonderful vintage image blocks, ranging from whimsical Victoriana through to cheesy ads from the 70s and 80s, before everything moved to polymer plate. Donald wondered if I might not use a couple, like this one:

He thought it might be a good way to illustrate the word lorgnette, which is the central premise of the poem, but I decided to keep everything typographical, to stay away from the ready-made images, and make people do what I suspect Les Murray wanted people to do: go and look up the word.

Now

So I’m beavering away, even on the weekends, because doing something every day is the only way I’ll get everything done. I’ve had lots of visitors, including a bunch of wonderful librarians who have been helping me tear down the paper. Part of my brief was to promote the program locally, so I’ve had interviews with the local paper, the university paper and there’s one coming up with the local tv station. I’ve talked to English students about working visually with poetry from a textual viewpoint, and to printmaking students about working with text as image and markmaking with moveable type.

I’m discovering how fast I can work if I only have one roller, and one colour, but that working fast gives me blisters. I printed 130 pages (I allow for bad printing!) in two and a half hours on Sunday to produce an under-layer for my Vincent O’Sullivan poem layout:

It’s a poem about rocks in a river forming trains like bridal veils, so I’ve printed large pine type that has a distinct wood grain in a green-grey, and will make the three stanzas of the poem into charcoal-silver clumps that will have cool watery type trails.

While that layer dries, I’m working on the Stephen Edgar poem, a fabulous piece about imagining words in the air around oneself. While my inner vision is an airy one in dull colours, what has emerged from the type and colour resources (and Donald’s yearning for colour) is quite different. It’s early days yet, but I’ve pulled from the poem the notion of sunset revealing disintegrating words, so I’m using sunset colours of pinky-red and orange and black…

This is hot off the press this afternoon, my first tentative pull in one colour to see if the composition works. I’ll be running this one through the press twice, like the O’Sullivan, which will cut into my time a bit. I can see the next two weeks being completely manic as I try to get everything printed in time for the folios to be collated by the last week. I’ve just finished talking to the most excellent university binder here about the folio design of black & white with a strip of overprinted proof inset into the front. Yum!

I have been blogging my Dunedin experiences, both printing and otherwise, at my personal blog, and there are more photos on my flickr page.

(BTW, If you’re interested in purchasing Prime, you can contact Donald by emailing donald[dot]kerr[at]otago[dot]ac[dot]nz. Because the press is not-for-profit, they retail the PIR produce at very affordable prices, and pump all the money back into the residency. This folio of seven posters will be only NZ$250 plus postage and packing (for the whole folio, not individual posters). We’ve already sold a third of the edition, so don’t delay if you want one.)

Cross-posted at Slow Making.

What I tend to do is work on other people’s ideas, and get them made. And I like to teach people how to do things for themselves, but again, running courses tends to take a lot of time, because I have to organise the course myself. (Why aren’t there agents for artists like there are for writers? I know there are galleries, but they just want to move the units, not get involved in the community.)

So I came up with the idea of offering a small residency to emerging artists I had worked with at the ANU Art School. The structure was already there: the Emerging Artists’ Support Scheme, which encourages members of the local community to donate residencies, funds, space in collections, exhibitions, whatever they feel they can do. At the end of the year, when the students graduate, the EASS Patrons (as they are termed) get first look at the Grad Show, and pick out the recipients of their largesse.

I thought I would buy some paper at one of the various paper sales (Neil Wallace and MES do good ones, usually twice a year) and offer the student/s (I’ll either choose one or two a year, depending upon that year’s talent pool) some time in my personal studio to make a broadside, which is basically a letterpress poster. In contemporary fine press tradition, a broadside is a beautiful typographical exercise in laying out poetry, and perhaps including a tasteful image or two (this site has some good examples); I’m all for that, and maybe some of my recipients will do things that way, but essentially I’m asking them to make a poster edition, and I’m leaving the brief very broad… one rule is that text needs to be in it, and the other rule is to have fun.

It’s quite fun, walking around the giant exhibition that the ANU School of Art becomes at graduation time, and thinking about who would respond to my opportunity. At first I thought that any student with a flair for design could be in the running — and I still think that, really — but this first year (2009/10), I thought that I’d make it easy on myself while I’m working out the arrangements, and chose two students with whom I’d worked in my Book Comp class, and who I knew had an interest in the process and could actually achieve an outcome without getting bored and wandering away…

As my first resident, Natalie Azzopardi, finishes her time with me, I think I’m very happy with my decision. Having someone playing with the equipment while I do other work in my studio is not particularly invasive, and I enjoy the chance to let them play without classtime constraints.

Another wonderful advantage for the recipients is that they can put the residency on their CVs, and if they want to travel, maybe others overseas will allow them time in their personal or community studios, since there are so few opportunities in Australia to access typography equipment. I’m going to provide each person who completes a broadside with a letter of recommendation, listing the skills that they have developed during the residency.

I’ve also decided to hold back the first ten prints of each edition, in the hope that after a few years I will have a set for exhibition, and a number of sets to offer as a mixed folio edition.

When I gave the prize to her, she hadn’t officially left the ANU School of Art; they have a strange system where you do three years of study, then you exhibit as a graduate, and then you find out if you are doing Honours, and then you do another year and then exhibit as a graduate again. It isn’t unusual to win an exhibition prize as a 3rd Year graduate, and then be still study when you exhibit as an emerging artist. Of course, most of the time Patrons are warned when someone may be getting into Honours, but that’s not a foolproof system…

Actually, I knew Natalie would do honours, because her work is excellent, but she’d just spent a semester doing letterpress with me in class, and I didn’t want to wait another year and have her go all rusty on me. So I snaffled her when I could. I thought she could make her broadside in the uni holidays and then get on with her year.

That was a good plan, but… she got very interested in the process, and one idea led to another, and before we knew it, four months of Tuesdays had flown by and she’d produced four posters out of the one allotment of paper. I bet her teachers are pleased that we’ve finished, because now she’s really got no excuse but to do her honours work, which has very little to do with letterpress (she’s a Photography student who studied Book as a complementary unit).

Here she is, back in Summer, starting on her Mario design, using grid paper to aid her set-up. The type tray is full of type ornaments not unlike these ones. After doing the Mario set-up, I found a box of dot ornaments, and she liked them so much that all the other prints restraint themselves to a dot matrix, so to speak.

I’m really happy with what she’s done. She’s learned a lot about type and presswork, and that if you plan ahead, you don’t have to print the same colour twice (or even three times, in one case!). But when the work is all intuitive and experimental, sometimes good things happen from the accidents of other things. Some of my favorite work in this project wasn’t able to be editioned, and we have a couple of copies each.

Like this page, where she has offset the ink by pressing one print against another to create a fantastic ghostly effect that works so well with the theme.

So the final editions reflect the planning she put into them. She started by thinking about Mario:

And this was a real learning curve, trying to decide how to make it a three-colour print. In the end it became a two-colour print, because we thought that the subtle patterning in the rest of his shape would be overwhelmed by the dots if his face & hands were printed in a solid colour, so we came up with the idea of embossing his skin.

There are 55 copies of this print, because we’d split the original paper ration into three smaller piles of 60 each, and she’d printed the first colour run of this and the next before deciding to play with the Space Invaders and thus dividing the ration even further!

And so then there is the Pacman print, of which there are 50 copies:

And then we get to the two Space Invader prints:

This one has 20 copies,

… and this one has 14!

The wood type was the last thing printed on all of them. Natalie knew what she wanted, but it was a matter of finding the perfect font and working out the colours. Originally we’d thought of printing all the text in the same spot on each poster, in one unifying colour, but once she looked at all the prints together, it was obvious that they needed individual treatment. Which meant three more colour runs! With letterpress it isn’t just a matter of changing a colour; you have to ink up the press, print, then clean off the press and then start again. It’s laborious, and takes patience and dedication, which Natalie has.

While they’re editioned, each of the prints is really an individual, as feeding the paper through the press is done by a human, not a mechanical process… there are slight variations of alignment which means that your print, signed by the artist and chopmarked with the Ampersand Duck mark, is really your own print, and not a unit in a mass-produced project.

So. These fabulous broadsides are available from my Duckshop (<== on the sidebar, to your left). Don’t miss out, they will hopefully all sell, and that may fund a part of Natalie’s next project, whatever that may be. I’m positive this won’t be her last printing experience!

Stay tuned for a very different broadside experience when Peter McLean makes his edition with me.

Definition: the ridiculous habit of talking through your arse hat. Proof.

My small contribution to Australia’s 2007 election struggle.
Still available, a great souvenir of a thankfully bygone era.

Poster, 510 x 230 mm, handset letterpress using wood and metal type, printed on cream coated offset paper.

Due to the nature of type and ink, each one has its individual qualities, and they look grand and glossy on the coated paper, and slightly bitten into the surface. Yummy!

The chase has been dismantled, so while there has been no final edition number, there will be no more printed, so stocks will run out, and there are only a few left.

AUS$13 EACH
Thanks to the non-weighty goodness of paper, multiple copies (within reason) can be sent with only one postage charge.
Contact me for more details or to purchase. I will send you an invoice that can be paid by Paypal, EFT or cheque.