PRINTING PROCESSES –

Is it Silk Screen or Serigraphy?

Limited edition art prints on paper are potboiler income for artists. They allow you to produce very saleable original artwork that is less labour intensive. 

You can afford to scatter a few here and there, sell direct at low cost, create a spontaneous buy, or even give a few away as goodwill. Artists need income to do their next work, and my experience is that art galleries don’t wish to buy in stock as a shop would but wish to stock their shops free. Sad because they have no incentive to sell, having made no financial outlay. That’s the ‘ex-Distribution Industry Training Consultant’ talking!

As a young art student living in a town that printed two thirds of the printed matter in the UK, a fellow student’s father, who was one of a thousand printers in the town, asked us, after a day learning about ‘Silkscreen’ – “How are you going to use silkscreen in a unique and better way than any other printing process?”

What he asked was how could we, as art students, make better use, to more effect, be cheaper, quicker – using a commercial back yard process normally used to print cardboard boxes – how could we as creatives use this cheap as chips, bits of wood, sticky lick tape and mum’s silk curtains, to create a high fashion length of cloth, a poster or better – a work of art?

What could we do that a commercial printer could not?

Well first, we could do original artwork, not a reproduction – that is a ‘Direct Process Print’ like Etchings or Lithographs.

The silkscreen process allows both original prints and reproduced images. It’s original printing, the ‘direct’ printed image that interests me here in this issue of The New Zealand Artist Magazine.

‘Serigraphy’ is the correct art term for what many call an artist’s ‘silkscreen print’ – let’s use the correct word and separate art away from commercial printing. Of course it is, but silkscreen is merely the ‘process’ method, a commercial printer’s term, not a term for a skilled artist crafts person such as Walter Gropius would have admired. It’s the difference of charging 21 shillings, (a Guinea) rather than 20 shillings (a pound). We artists hope we are among the professionals. Remember it’s always the artists and writers who are rounded up as politically dangerous, the deeper thinkers, well, at least in Latin countries.

Serigraphy is a wonderful reproduction method for a creative person like me, living on my own beach – I need nothing special other than modern imported terylene (silk) and dyestuff or inks. Everything else exists, however those who are presently working with the process appear to understand little of what is possible. They treat it usually as a commercial process, often using computers and photo process stencils made for them, by others, at a cost. This is all very fine, but like machine printing the process is not hand crafted or ‘direct’ as an original lithograph pulled from the stone. Copies of artwork are no better in my opinion, than good reproductions printed by offset ‘litho’, or Photo Gravure, both excellent but designed to provide low-cost big runs of thousands, to get the printing costs per unit down.

In my capacity as a community College Arts and Craft coordinator, I endeavoured to introduce the silk screen process to Northland because I know it is easily available to self-employed working artists or fabric printers. My ‘Department of Education’ brief was to get ‘alternative life stylers’ in outback Northland into a job. Not possible, but ‘into income’, yes, working at home. A good example was the cottage craft operation I established in the Pueblo de Valdeolmos in Spain, 1996 with scarf hand painter Aztec Mexican film minor star, Marta Tuck. With her Manhattan accent, she invited me to a remote Pueblo to teach and set up ‘Creaciones Originales Estampados a Mano’ a back yard low-cost high fashion ‘one-off’ haute couture fashion house. We later supplied the Hilton boutiques on the Costa del Sol and even Macy’s in New York City. The village women were our ‘maker-uppers’. We dressed Spain’s Eurovision contestant while I was a part time consultant with Danis SA, J Walter Thompson and NCK.

Later, on arrival in New Zealand, I introduced the first ever printed T-shirts to New Zealand in Rotorua and Northland to support my art, but only for a couple of months a year. I didn’t wish to be a T-shirt printer – but I understood the process well. So how could I make serigraphy an art form, away from the usual commercial reproduction process that printers employ? They start with an original one or full colour artwork, colour separate it, nominate a screen for each colour printing, and successive colour printings. Then they print each colour, to put the image back together, printing 50, 500, 5000 on alternate sheets of paper, card, tin, glass, even hundreds at a time. Very useful, but only ever a reproduction of the original.

My approach, attempting to produce something a printer could not, as asked at age 15 by the Watford printer 20 years before, was to reduce the technology to absolute basics. Hand work, painting in a blocker (I once used swimming pool paint when pushed) cutting a stencil in paper or capillary film, printing a small run in one or more colours. Then other printings in register with the first run, involving more colours either by specific colour inks, or by using Tri-chromatic dyestuffs overprinted on each other. A yellow over printed by translucent blue gives green. Three colours for the price of two.

Later I varied the ink strength or colour with each individual print, and possibly a third printing. When using Tri-chromatic dyestuff, one can achieve many colours or textures. Then just to be clever, I recovered my first screen after a small print run, blocked out areas and reprinted using the same original hand cut, but now reduced stencil.  With ‘Arboreal Marriage’ my inspiration came from my oil painting on my easel of a model who was married in Hatea Park, Whangarei. I cut the stencil with a scalpel, looking at the painting. Obviously, it helps if one understands most printing processes and methods – colour especially – but also to be able to think in negative as it’s the negative or open areas that print. Positive/negative fascinates me, one mark – two images. Interestingly ‘Arboreal Marriage’ (title image) tricks the eye – in large prints one sees trees, the magic of Robert Graves spirits of the wood, the life Force itself.  In small reproduction, one sees figures.

Always an adventurer and usually breaking all the rules, I was first known as a fabric printer in New Zealand, as I started a New Zealand extension to our print room in Spain.  I had a one-man show in New Zealand House, London in 1975 as Auckland galleries were avoiding ‘living artists’, Creative Directors were worse than car salesman was their implication.

Starting with a three-meter length of cloth or later with a delicious sheet of Arches heavy 640 GSM Aquarelle, I printed for years out of an adapted cow shed. When Air New Zealand and Jasmad Architects directors arrived, after commissioning me to print fabric for their hotel in Rarotonga, (750 full length drapes, 400 bedspreads and some lava-lava type staff uniforms), the directors asked my late wife Meg “but, where’s the machine?” Her reply: “he is getting some milk from the store!”

I share these stories simply because I wish to prove to you, budding artists, that if you keep a nice home and a tidy wardrobe, arrange pictures, even the bits on your fridge door in an interesting way, you are creative. You have colour sense.  The sky’s the limit – just keep it simple and rewarding.  Serigraphy needs no special gear or outside people to provide screens, photo process or anything. My nine-year-old daughter never asked how to silk screen – she cut the bottom out of a cardboard box, stuck some of her Mums panty hose on the box, made a paper stencil, borrowed some of my dye and printed herself a T shirt – all in an hour!

For beginners you can cut a thin paper stencil, (actually you get two stencils because you can also use the bits you cut out) then lay out a short length of cotton, pick up the paper bits on the screen by printing with some water-based dyestuff – then straight away print a ‘lava-lava’ in two or more colours, all in half an hour. You learn from doing. I want to cry when I see students labouring for four weeks in night class, struggling with all kinds of information, which usually turns them off, or is so complicated and needs costly time-consuming outsourced services to process, or even stretch a screen – it takes only about eight minutes by hand.

Yes, I had my own photo process for occasional down to earth jobs involving typesetting – but how much more fun to prepare a photo light sensitive screen in red light and place leaves and flowers from your garden to expose. Printed on Indian cotton you can have your own curtains in multi colour leaves and flowers. Or you can set up your nude model in red light using red process film on the windows – nobody needs a dark room, as I discovered on the third floor of my supplier in a high rise in Kusnacht Zurich – and draw directly onto the unexposed emulsion, by hand, in black felt pen.

After exposure as usual, the felt pen acts as an inter-positive on the screen, and then is blown out with water – the line image a ‘direct’ perfect drawing – printable over and over, each an original. We creative artists must have income like this to do the next thing.

I hope my thoughts are useful – Happy year ahead.

References: Eve Magazine – ‘A Most Uncommon Man’ 1974. Designscape Magazine – ‘A Fresh Approach to Silkscreen Printing’ 1975.