A while ago, I posted this on my other blog.

***

In this book from The Tate about the artist Sir Terry Frost, I found this:

"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".

Until now I have never 'got' the work of Mark Rothko - I loved his way with paint, but never understood the paintings themselves. Somehow this quote managed to pin down for me their essentially meditative nature.

Which leads me to this from Rothko:

"Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. "

***

I still find these inspiring and they still inform some of what I am trying to do in my own work, however unsuccessfully. I was prompted to repost them by this post over on Tina Mammoser's blog.

Without any formal art education, I tend to come on new artists by chance or recommendation or perhaps from the media. Accordingly my knowledge of art and artists is patchy and variable. As an example I recently watched a documentary on TV about the artist Joan Mitchell, who was at the time unknown to me. Stimulated by that I have been looking, on the net only alas, at some of the work of her contemporaries. Like most people with a passing interest in the subject I knew of Pollock and Rothko, but beyond that people like Mitchell and de Kooning had passed me by.

One of the things that fascinates me about abstract art is the way in which a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of blocks of colour on a flat surface can still evoke a sense of 3D space. I found this in much of de Kooning's work. As an example, looking through a book about him, I came on two pictures - 'Palisade' from 1957 and 'September Morn' from 1958, both of which immediately made me think of the work of the Victorian artist John Martin, whose work I saw recently at the Tate Gallery in London. They had strong resonances with Martin's vast, storm swept landscapes, usually with a tiny human figure somewhere in the scene.

Similarly, 'Montauk Highway' conjures up a strong sense of movement through space which was apparent without knowing the title.

For me this goes to the point of my previous post about the difference between abstraction and abstract. De Kooning's paintings are fully abstract but still refer to and draw on landscape and 'real' space in their organisation and composition.

Edit: This is post 100 on this blog, which at one stage I thought I would never meet. To celebrate I am offering 10% of the first 10 orders from the shop received before the end of April. I'm going to be adding some new small prints in a day or so, so keep checking.

Howard Hodgkin is on record as saying that he has never painted an abstract in his life. This may seem surprising when when one looks at his work, but is explained by the fact that for Hodgkin all his work is about something specific - a place, an event or a person. Other abstract painters do not make this sort of claim, but nevertheless often seem to reference the world at large. Arshile Gorky's work for example often seems to include substantial figurative elements.

Joan Mitchell's paintings on the other hand have a strong landscape feel.

Despite these references, I still have problems when I see work being sold on Etsy or EBay described as 'abstract landscape'. This seems to me to be an oxymoron, but not one that is especially helpful. By definition surely, an abstract cannot simultaneously be a landscape. An abstract may reference landscape, but as a painting it cannot be both.

I think the use of these two terms in conjunction arises because of a confusion between the object - an abstract painting is after all an object - and the process of making it, the process of abstraction. It may be the writer in me, but I don't think this is mere wordplay. Too much of contemporary art is seen as at best remote from reality and at worst as meaningless and pretentious. Clarity of language is one way to challenge that view.

It is common for artists to be told of the importance of developing a consistent and coherent style. Galleries of course like this since it makes marketing so much easier if an artist can be nicely packaged up. I've never been entirely convinced of this - at least from the creative perspective. In a comment on this I said:

I regularly see advice to 'develop a consistent style', but I still don't see the benefit to me as an artist. If I have to keep rehashing the same old thing to please buyers I stop developing and stop growing as an artist. I make art because I am driven to do it. If I have to make art to please other people then I'm not making art, I'm running a production line. I'll leave that to the Chinese...

I raised this issue on Etsy, provoking this response from artist Victoria Webb:

Ian, I'm with you on the idea of experimenting as an artist. While some of that article by Ms. Woodward has good advice, the notion that to get 'seen' by gallerists or collectors requires a stand out 'style' is just nonsense. The best artists change all the time, and that includes giants like Picasso.

This conflict between artistic creativity and the demands of the gallery system has affected some major artists.

It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say that pretty much every professional relationship that I had cultivated throughout the 1990s collapsed as a result of what happened to my work in Mayo. When people looked at the paintings their jaws dropped. It was as if I’d betrayed them. How dare I take another path?

Stuart Shils about the problems he had when his style changed following a visit to Ireland in 1998.

The artist Patrick Heron had similar problems after a change of direction.

[The gallery director] wrote to Heron complaining that he was just beginning to find a market for his still lives and now Patrick had to hit him with this. Most artists have to put up with gallery owners who would like them to stick to the latest selling line…

Patrick Heron by Michael McNay, Tate Publishing

Some things just cannot be improved. That isn't to say they are flawless, because that would make them inhuman and it is, perhaps paradoxically, in the flawed that we find the most sublime art. Can you imaging for example, Billie Holiday's memorable album 'Lady in Satin' sung by Ella Fitzgerald?

The search for perfection does lie of course at the heart of much human endeavour - but acceptance, even delight, in the imperfect leaves us in the end richer.

I cannot agree with the painters who claim superciliously that the layman can understand nothing of painting, and that he can best show his appreciation of their works by silence and a cheque-book. It is a grotesque misapprehension which sees in art no more than a craft comprehensible perfectly only to the craftsman; art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

W. Somerset Maughan The Moon and Sixpence

Is this true do you think? Granted that the book from which this is taken is a fictionalised account of the life of Gaugain and perhaps addressed to a particular form of art, is it still true that art is about emotion? If that is so, what if the emotion the artists intends to capture or represent is not that experienced by the viewer of the work? Has the artist failed in those circumstances, or do we accept that emotion is internal, that we can never fully know the emotions experienced by others and that therefore art is no more imperfect a way of communicating emotion than the many other forms of communication adopted by the human race - from poetry to song to whispered words in the bedroom?

This long post has grown out of an attempt to analyse why the idea of 'palimpsest' has become so important in my work. In it I attempt to trace a path from my previous life as a planner to my present one as an artist and to examine how ideas and people from my former existence still influence me.

Early in my career as a planner I developed an abiding interest in how towns and cities developed, especially the way in which the history of a place can be read in the world around us. I'm not just talking about buildings, although these obviously show their history too. I have always had a fascination for things like crumbling and patched brickwork for example.

Street patterns, building plots, even field boundaries can survive for hundreds, even thousands of years, all casting shadows into the present day and creating a richness and depth in our environment that we recognise, often can't define and almost always cannot replicate.

Many of the planning and architectural writers I admire, and who influenced me as a planner, seem to have had similar obsessions with growth, change and emerging complexity. The book that started it all, after realising that my maths simply wasn't good enough for chemical engineering, and which literally changed my life is Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, which I read in 1964/65. As the wikipedia article on the book puts it:

...modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos.

I found the ideas she espoused fascinating, especially the idea of places and communities emerging from small individual decisions. Much later in my working life, and still before I had any ideas of being an artist, a colleague introduced me to the work of Christopher Alexander, in particular his book A Pattern Language. (Also see his web site).

The language begins with patterns that define towns and communities. These patterns can never be designed or built in one fell swoop - but patient piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns, will, slowly and surely, over the years, make a community that has these global patterns in it.

Relatively recently I discovered two other books that helped crystallise my ideas. The first was by architect Camillo Sitte, called City Planning According to Artistic Principles'. Sitte analysed the growth of historic cities like Venice, showing how as buildings were modified and extended, the architects gradually created the superlative environment of the modern city. The many squares and piazzas did not spring into existence fully formed but are the result of perhaps hundreds of years of change and incremental growth. The second was How Buildings Learn, by Stuart Brand (of the Whole Earth Catalogue which looked at how buildings grow and adapt in response to changing needs.

I finally I got the chance to apply some of these ideas - with modest success - in my own work.

I referred at the beginning to palimpsest as an influence on my work as an artist. This was originally a term used to describe a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The historian studying such a document wants to separate the layers to make sense of each separate one. Her interest in the manner in which these layers have accumulated is incidental. Architects use the term to refer to signs of what once was on a site. Urban historians mean it to show how the complex environment of the present day has accumulated over time.

Other writers have taken it further still.

A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than once. Frequently it's impossible to say which layer was first inscribed; and in any case any "development" ... from layer to layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A "developed" into layer B (we're not even sure which came first). And yet the juxtapositions may not be purely "random" or "meaningless"....
Juxtaposition, superimposition, and complex patterning thus produce a malleable unity
(Hakim Bey http://hermetic.com/bey/palimpsest.html)

So we have three statements:

Bey - Juxtaposition, superimposition and complex patterning to produce a malleable unity.

Jacobs - layered complexity

Alexander - piecemeal growth, designed in such a way that every individual act is always helping to create or generate these larger global patterns

Although written from three very different perspectives these summarise very precisely the essential central idea in my art.

My images are not conceived as a coherent whole from the outset. They grow in front of me, whether physically or on the computer screen through a process of accumulation and accretion. Each intervention in the piece, each mark, each dab of ink on the plate, each stroke of the pen has to be made so as to build on what has happened so far and enrich it.

I've been working for what seems like ages on a post about my own journey from being a professional planner to becoming an artist. It keeps growing and sometimes it feels as if I'm writing an autobiography not a blog post. Once completed I will need to split it into sections I think, but just to keep things ticking over here is philosopher Robert Nozick on portrait painting from his book The Examined Life .

Why is it that no photograph of a person has the depth a painted portrait can have? The two embody different quantities of time. A photograph is a "snapshot," whether or not it was posed; it shows one particular moment of time and what the person looked like right then, what his surface showed. During the extended hours a painting is sat for, though, its subject shows a range of traits, emotions, and thoughts, all revealed in differing lights. Combining different glimpses of the person, choosing an aspect here, a tightening of muscle there, a glint of light, a deepening of line, the painter interweaves these different portions of surface, never before simultaneously exhibited, to produce a fuller portrait and a deeper one. The portraitist can select one tiny aspect of everything shown at a moment to incorporate into the final painting. A photographer might attempt to replicate this, isolating and layering and interweaving aspects of many photographs of the face at different times; could these many minute choices then result in a final printed photograph that achieved the full depth of a painting? (The experiment is worth trying, if only to isolate what is special to painting in contrast to even a highly manipulated photographic process, what is contributed, for example, by the special tonalities of oil paint and by the tactile resonance of different ways of applying and building the paint.) However, during the hours he spends with his subject, a painter can come to know things the visible surface did not show - what the person said, the manner of his behavior toward others - and hence add or emphasize details to bring to the surface what resides underneath.

The painter concentrates a person over an extended time into a presence at one moment that, however, cannot be taken in fully in a moment. Because so much more time is concentrated in a painting than a photograph, we need - and want - to spend more time before it, letting the person unfold.

This goes I think to my obsession with the idea of palimpsest in art and makes me think that perhaps my concern is not so much about layers of imagery per se, but about capturing time...

I picked up an old copy of Creative Camera magazine from September 1968 and found on the comment pages this splendid rant about the importance of history.

Our recent questionnaire invited readers to comment on the contents of our magazine.
Many said they disliked our `emphasis' on the history of photography. We asked Dr Aaron
Scharf, head of the History of Art Department at St Martin's School of Art, and our
Album columnist, for his reaction: `I've heard this one about nasty old "History" before. I
never got the impression that Creative Camera was heavy on history. I wonder what
motivates such criticisms? Usually the "I hate history" jag comes either from the
truly ignorant or the pseudo-sophisticate. We get it in art all the time. One of the reasons
that art has reached such an impasse is because it ignores history and instead feeds only on
last week's output, hankering after STYLE rather than grasping at fundamentals. Is not
the same also true of photography?

`To me, a disdain for history is wilful ignorance: deliberate blindness. But of course I
mean history in its richest, most personal sense. However, it is the vogue today to reject
the past-as though one really can. The cheek of some people! And what narcissism!
History can't teach ME anything! I project MY trivia onto history, thus it can only must
only, deal in trivia. So help me! History is nothing but a useless collection of facts, dates
and other irrelevancies! There you have "modern" man, the quick-results man, the
man of action with a Lilliputian mind. The Bauhaus? Surrealism? Why that's already
history. In a year's time, if not sooner, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and a
dozen photographers of "Note", will be as much a part of the past as Shirley
Temple and Al Capone. Our greatest blindness is that we believe a thing is better
simply because it is new.

'I am sure you will understand this. I am an historian BECAUSE I DON'T
BELIEVE IN "HISTORY". To me, what is called "History" is a living, palpable thing
with more relevance to modern man than all the social and aesthetic trumperies belched
forth in last week's public communications. I could not continue Album and
deliberately amputate what is so interesting, so instructive and so meaningful from
the story of photography in order to satisfy some misguided readers. And don't forget,
those with complaints are usually the ones most willing to answer such questionnaires.
By their silence, most of the others show their satisfaction. In my opinion, however
honourably motivated, it is a mistake to produce such quiz-type questionnaires. Certainly
you want to discover what your readers think-but permit me to say you ought to do it
without having them commit their criticisms (some of which would be manufactured
for the occasion anyway) to such a formal document.'

I have just had to produce a statement for a forthcoming show. In it I developed my thoughts slightly further about the idea of palimpsest that so fascinates me. I will be updating my "About" page soon, but for the moment here is the statement as written.

***

Artistically, I began some 45 years ago with photography and have been clicking away ever since. I have an archive now of perhaps 10,000 images. About 10 years ago I began to experiment with manipulating some of these photographs in the computer. I was keen to create new images that could not exist in any other way and I am still experimenting.
About 4 years ago I had the chance to look around an artist print studio, observing the process of making linocuts and other more traditional print forms. I was hooked and within days I had enrolled on a course. I’m now entering my fourth year of study, still learning and still experimenting.

My work has many themes. You will find images of the natural landscape, the city and of people - especially dancers - all in a range of styles from abstract to representational. I enjoy colour in all its forms from vibrant and intense, to soft pastels. So far I have concentrated on collagraph, monoprints and recently on screen prints.

A constant element in all my work is the idea of palimpsest.

A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than once. Frequently it's impossible to say which layer was first inscribed; and in any case any "development" … from layer to layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A "developed" into layer B (we're not even sure which came first). And yet the juxtapositions may not be purely "random" or "meaningless".

…

Juxtaposition, superimposition, and complex patterning thus produce a malleable unity

(Hakim Bey http://hermetic.com/bey/palimpsest.html)

I am now extending this idea by combining different print media in one image. In this show for example “Tree of Life” for example, uses manipulated photographs as the basis for a series of screen print stencils, building the image up in layers. “Dales Memories” uses two separate collagraph plates. The image is built up in thin glazes of ink, often over only part of the plate. Some variations of the image have required ten or more impressions. I have also printed digitally over a screen prints, digitally manipulated pastel sketches and used these to make stencils for screen printing over monoprints and used digital images to make etched plates in a process called solar etching. Because of this each image in an edition will show variations in colour and configuration, sometimes obviously so, but often in more subtle ways.

Simply by sailing in a new direction

You could enlarge the world

Listening to the radio on Sunday evening, these words from a poem leapt out at me. They captured why art is so important. It isn't about pretty pictures, attractive colours and shapes but about enlarging the world in which we live. Great art does this for us obviously, but so does all art. As we make art we enlarge our own world and thus our lives and the lives of those we share it with. So the next time anyone says to you that art is unimportant compared to famine, politics or whatever, remember this quotation.

I didn't catch the poets name at the time, but googling the words, they turn out to be from "Landfall in Unknown Seas" by Allen Curnow.

Arguably, our need for beauty is almost as great as our need for companionship. Like the latter need, it is one that we sometimes fail to recognise; and it is also sometimes one that we satisfy without realising it, by responding to patterns and colours (as in clothing) and rhythms (as in popular music) and character (by identifying with the hero or heroine of a story). These are all unconscious preferences for what are, or are close to, forms of beauty. What this shows is that beauty is so important to human life that it is well worth the time and resources we devote to making and enjoying it, as all history attests. It would be a pity if ever we allowed functionality and profit to hide it from view.

Philosopher A C Grayling, writing in the National Trust magazine for Summer 2011.

It's a truism I suppose, that as we get older, our tastes change and develop. My own late involvement in things artistic, coupled with thoughts about ageing as covered by Ronni Bennett has however caused me to think about this rather more deeply

I'm not alone in developing an interest in art late in life. Grandma Moses for example took it up even later than me, in her 70s. I wonder though if there are common factors or triggers. Grandma Moses was an embroiderer before she took up painting. Harry Bell, as I remember from our school days together, seems to have had a natural talent for drawing, but didn't fully pursue it until his 40s, when he went back to university and took a Fine Art degree.

In my case I've always been as much interested in the idea of creativity as in being creative. I first read Arthur Koestler's wonderful book The Act of Creation, some years ago and I suppose that ties in with one of my other interests, philosophy. I remember years ago on a training course, coming across Eric Berne's Transactional Analysis and in the course of some quiz, scoring highly on the Adult and Child axes, which according to the tutor was a strong indicator of creativity. I have to admit however, that after thirty years working in local government, I didn't come across many people who were obviously creative- or at least who tried to be creativity to their daily work. Any signs of a creative spark were seen not as something to encourage or build upon, but to be stamped out like a fallen ember from the fire.

It seems possible therefore that one factor that drives people towards creative activities in later life is that in their working lives creativity was suppressed. I have no idea of the conditions of Harry's working environment, but I know it was in the Civil Service, which from my contacts over the years is even more suspicious of new ideas than local government.

I wonder how much creativity is locked up and suppressed by the demands of work, and what the impact would be for all of us if that creativity could be set free.

(First posted in a slightly different form here)

Any general theory of art must begin with this supposition: that man responds to the shape and surface and mass of things present to his senses, and that certain arrangements in the proportion of the shape and surface and mass of things result in a pleasurable sensation, whilst the lack of such arrangements leads to indifference or even to positive discomfort and revulsion.

Herbert Read The Meaning of Art

I realised when reading this previous post that my concluding paragraph doesn't really address the issues as clearly as I would have liked. Rather than edit that post - an edit would probably be missed by those who had already read it - I'm picking the topic up afresh here.

In essence I want to make two points:

First, the complex process by which these prints are made calls into question their conventional attribution to a single named artist. Decisions by the so-called 'copy artist' (hikko), by the carver and by the printer all had a significant impact on the aesthetic and artistic quality of the finished piece. Attribution to the 'artist' seriously devalues the contribution made by the other artisans involved.

Second, the multiple stages of production also call into question the narrow view of the original that surfaces from time to time and that I have already addressed in several posts here. Let's look at these stages and see where the 'original' might be found.

The conventional attribution might suggest that the original lies in the initial drawing by the artist. Setting aside that this drawing is done purely for the purpose of creating a woodblock print (what I called in this post the 'intention of the artist'), this causes immediate problems for the second, more elaborate drawing used to prepare the blocks. Despite being prepared by the so-called copy artist this second drawing (hanshita)  is in no way a straight copy. Woodblock printer David Bull in this discussion thread, included some examples that make this point very clearly.

Here for example is an initial sketch by Hokusai.

While here is the same section from the final print:

The step between these two is of course destroyed in the carving of the block, but it is clear that the making of the hanshita involved much more than simply tracing and required in its own right a considerable artistic input.

David Bull also provided an example of a surviving hanshita, which is as detailed as any final print:

David Bull's argument is that the role played by these other craftsmen (and they almost always were men) demands a much greater recognition. I agree entirely, but my point here is in relation to the identification of the 'original'. If the surviving example of a hanshita is typical of the great ukiyo-e prints, and I see no reason to believe otherwise, then those unknown artists should be seen as artists in their own right.

If on that basis we then argue that the hanshita is the original, the initial sketch becomes just a preliminary study - a concept drawing - and the attribution should go to the hanshita artist.

What about those who argue that the plate (or the photographic negative or the digital file) is the original? I have argued elsewhere that those few who attempt to make this argument do so either from ignorance of the process or from special pleading (ie they sell reproductions and want their product to be elevated to the same standing as 'handpulled prints') Nevertheless if we take the argument at face value, it still doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. A typical woodblock print may have 15 or more blocks and some may be used 2 or 3 times. Some prints require perhaps 100 impressions to get to the final image. There is thus no single block that can be pointed to as the 'original' .

Normally these prints were not produced in limited editions. Each print run would be quite small - perhaps 200 - to reduce wear and tear on the blocks, but there would be no overall limit. The same applies in fact in the West - prints by the master wood engraver Thomas Bewick were not issued in limited runs.

In summary therefore, if we try to place the 'original' anywhere but the final print, many problems arise. If we accept the defining characteristic as being intention, then regardless of the numbers produced, the original is the printed paper on which the image appears and all these other problems simply disappear.

I did, rather mischievously perhaps, consider the idea that these woodblock prints are perhaps the earliest conceptual art. After all the process starts with an idea - or concept - in the mind of the publisher, who then draws together the resources to realise his concept. That would make the publisher the 'artist' of attribution!

This is based on a post I made in an Etsy forum some time ago as a part of the continuing debate there about prints, originals and reproductions, hence the mock legal terms of the 'Disclaimer.'

Many years ago, I had an Irish friend who would, in the course of conversation, refer to the people he was talking about as "yer man". Unfortunately, "yer man" might in the course of even a single statement refer to several different people, so it became very difficult to follow what he was saying.

I think we have reached a similar impasse in on-line dialogue with words like 'print' replacing 'yer man' and being used inconsistently - and without any thought or recognition given to the meanings that might be attached to the word by others.

The rest of this post is an attempt to unscramble things by using neutral language in an exercise in logic not art.

Bear with me please, because it will be long.

***

DISCLAIMER

Nothing said below shall be construed in whole or in part as criticism, denigration, or defamation of any person, art form or art medium or any combination thereof.

In particular any terminology used is for the purpose of logical differentiation between the various classes of objects referred to herein and the use of such terminology should not be construed as implying that the said terminology represents either current artistic or 'lay' usage, or that such usage is or has been applied, used or otherwise adopted by any other person or group of persons, named or unnamed in this or any other thread on this site or any other Internet site or in any written, broadcast or other format.

***

So - to begin:

It is generally accepted by most people that there is a class or category of objects called prints. Because there are various types of prints let us call this overall category Prints_(cat).

It is argued by a very large group of people that terms like silkscreen print, woodblock print etc represent a class of objects also called prints, sometimes qualified as 'hand-pulled' prints. So, if we have a single category Prints_(cat), that would logically include 'hand-pulled' prints. For clarity let's call this sub-class, Prints_(h).

It is argued by a significant number of people that what I think of as a reproduction is validly called a print. So, Prints_(cat) would logically contain what I call reproductions. Let's call this sub-class Prints_(r).

Finally, it is also argued by perhaps a smaller but still significant number that the output from photomanipulations made using packages like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro or originated using packages like Corel Painter, Bryce etc - are also validly called prints, perhaps qualified in this case as 'digital prints'. So again, Prints_(cat) would logically include 'digital' prints. Lets call these Prints_(d).

So - we have a generic class of objects called Prints_(cat).

We also have various sub-classes described in various ways but generally as 'x' prints or in the form I have adopted here Prints_(x).

If we keep these logical labels it is clear what is going on. In other words:

Prints_(cat) contains Prints_(r), Prints_(h) and Prints_(d).                    {1}

When we remove the suffixes and state this proposition in plain English we get:

Prints as a category contains Reproduction Prints, Handpulled Prints and Digital Prints.          {2}

However REMOVE the qualifier and what happens - we are immediately unsure whether a tag 'Print' is referring to the top level category or the sub-category.

Prints contains Prints, Prints and Prints                           {3}

Not very helpful. That confusion could be removed easily if we used the terminology in the plain English statement at {2} above. It appears however that the terms Reproduction Print and Digital Print are unacceptable to many people, although those who object to the first may not object to the second - and vice versa. Others argue that they are in fact the same thing and should not be differentiated.

There are indeed of course similarities between the two sub-classes, but those similarities relate to the form of the output, usually but not exclusively ink jet/giclee printing. (Setting aside for the moment the uncertainties inherent also in those terms). The similarities do not extend to the question of artistic input.

In the case of Prints_(r) the artistic endeavour has gone into the creation of the source image. Some judgements have to be made in creating the print file in terms of issues like fidelity of colours to the source image etc, but in comparison to the artistic input to the source image proper that is minimal and the work to achieve it often delegated to print technicians or others.

In the case of Prints_(d), the artistic endeavour has gone directly into the creation of the digital file. Other issues like colour fidelity are of course relevant, but are incorporated in the whole process of making the image on-screen.

The argument that Prints_(d) are in fact equivalent to Prints_(r) is specious. It depends on a definition of the computer file as the original. This is false for two reasons.

1. We are talking about a visual medium and the computer file is not a visual artefact.
2. The argument conflates two uses of digital technology - as tool in the creation of the physical print and as medium in the creation of artwork like net installations, animation, virtual reality etc.

It would be possible I suppose to argue that the original of a digital work is the version seen on screen and that physical prints are reproductions of that screen display. That ignores the intention of the artist however. If I make a digital print with the intention from the outset of producing physical objects - ie the print, than I could argue (and to a degree I do so argue) that the reproduction is in fact the screen image.

This one is a part of what is intended to be a continuing series exploring the implications of digital technology for the artist. See these previous posts in the series. I hope you will join in the discussion.

One of the things that really gets my goat is sloppy use of language. I don’t mean slang – I mean where people simply use the first word that comes to mind without thinking of whether it is the right one for the circumstances. I don’t know why I’m so picky, although I don’t suppose my interest in philosophy has helped. I know it gets me into trouble from time to time, as for example when I comment on various fora about the way in which even established artists are happy to use of the word ‘print’ to mean ‘reproduction’.

I know of course that colloquially, ‘print’ is used to describe everything from a picture torn out of a magazine to a woodcut by Durer. Such a wide usage though means that without further qualification the term has almost no descriptive value. We could talk of a Durer print, but are we talking of one made from the original block in Nuremburg in 1515 or a cheap lithographic copy made in China in 2011?

When we talk of engravings or woodcuts we know these are of course prints but their defining characteristic is the fact of being an engraving or linocut, NOT that they are prints. Similarly while the lithographic copy I referred to may be a print, its defining characteristic is that it is a copy of a work if art in another medium. So, to provide full meaning we should talk about reproductions or reproduction prints, not just prints. We need the qualifying term to know properly what we are talking about.

Raising these issues in online fora almost always provokes outrage. I don’t know why, but the idea that if you are selling reproductions you should actually identify them as such seems to provoke the noisiest response from sellers of reproductions. Perhaps they are confused about the term ‘original’. I’ve seen at least one person take umbrage at a suggestion that the reproductions they were selling were not ‘original’ works of art, because they took the opposite of original to be not ‘copy’ or ‘reproduction’, but ‘un-original’ or ‘unimaginative’. Language is a slippery thing…

So that when I step on someone’s toes in future I have something to refer them to, I am setting out my position below.

1. I have no problem with other people producing reproductions, even though I don’t wish to do so myself.
2. A reproduction of a painting is not, OF ITSELF, a work of art - it is a copy of a work of art.
3. A reproduction of a painting is a print yes, but it is a reproduction print. Describing it as a print is a marketing tool, the acceptability of which will vary with your opinions on marketing. However when marketing to less knowledgeable members of the public accurate description is essential.
4. Reproductions sold as limited edition ink-jet or giclée prints are sold this way for marketing purposes. It has nothing to do with art and everything to do with creating artificial value.
5. Creating a limited edition reproduction print does not create genuine value. The true value of such a print depends not on the marketing hype of the original sellers but on the willingness of others to buy and sell that print. For 99% of such prints that secondary market does not exist. To be fair this probably applies also to the market in traditional ‘handpulled’ prints, although the numbers will be much smaller.
6. An original print is printed from a matrix on which the design was created by hand and issued as part of the original publishing venture or as part of a connected, subsequent publishing venture. For fine art prints the criteria used is more strict. A fine art print is original only if the artist both conceived and had a direct hand in the production of the print. An original print should be distinguished from a reproduction, which is produced photomechanically, and from a restrike, which is produced as part of a later, unconnected publishing venture.

(Definition from here: http://www.philaprintshop.com/diction.html)

That last definition begins to break down perhaps with photography, especially digital photography, and with digital art.Colloquially we talk of the photographic print, but in this case though so do most photographers. In the days when most photographs were produced using chemicals in a darkroom this wasn’t too bad, since many dark-room techniques – burning in and dodging for example – were craft skills and not precisely repeatable. A good darkroom technician would aim to get as much similarity as possible in a set of prints, just as a good print assistant would aim to get a consistent edition from say a linocut block.

Also, ...there are now many tens of thousands of individual photographers and artists, from amateurs to pros, who are able to print high-quality images in their own studios, homes, and offices. No longer constrained by the high costs of traditional printing methods, the production of "artistic" prints has been put in the hands of the greatest number of people--the artists and the imagemakers themselves.

This easy availability, this democratisation of the process of making reproductions is an example of the 'accelerated intensity' of the means of reproduction referred to by Walter Benjamin in his early paper, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (html  version here)

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography. For the first time in the process of pictorial reproduction, photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens.

Quite how this will all work out is an unknown. The wide spread availability of easy and cheap printmaking capacity must of necessity change our attitude to the idea of the 'original'. Trying to argue for example that each print in an edition of linocuts is an original, but each print made from a digital file created entirely in the computer is not, requires some awkward semantic somersaults. I'll come back to that aspect in another post.

I came on the work of Alan Wolfson via a post at Ronni Bennet's blog Time Goes By.

According to one of the quotes on his site:

Wolfson’s small, sculptured environments are mini slices of life full of intriguing contradictions. Sculpted without being sculptural, painterly without being paintings, narrative without a story, they exude a photographic or cinematic sense of reality while rarely depicting actual scenes or places. Creating them over the last twenty years, Wolfson has forged a unique place for himself in contemporary art.

I'm not denying the skill involved in making these works, but I do question that last sentence. I suppose it is accurate in strict terms, but only by accepting that 'contemporary art' has ignored a huge area of endeavour by thousands of people with equal skill. I'm talking here about Railway Modelling - or Model Railroads if you are in the US. I know many people will immediately laugh at this claim, but that is because they are ignorant of the tremendous skill that is demonstrated by workers in this area.

I don't have the space to go into a history of the hobby and that would be beside the point anyway, since not all railway modelling involves such work. Instead I want to look at the work of a few of the giants in the field, starting with one from the US, John Allen (July 2, 1913 – January 6, 1973).

Allen was an artist and photographer by training, but I don't think he saw what he did with his model railroad the Gorre & Daphetid as 'Art'. Even so the standard of his work was incredibly high. He worked at a landscape level as below:

He also made numerous street scenes, vignettes of everyday life:

On one site devoted to recording and chronicling his work is this statement:

To many, the Gorre & Daphetid is a three-dimensional sculpture symbolizing the impressive and spectacular degree to which model railroading can become an art form.

Given the recognition given to Wolfson, it is hard to disagree.

Moving across the Atlantic we come to a near contemporary of Allen, John Ahern (1903-1961). Ahern started modelling slightly earlier than Allen, in 1939. The world he created, the Madder Valley Railway was equally iconic, but this time it rendered into small scale the market towns and villages of southern England. The model still exists at the Pendon Museum in Oxfordshire.

The Madder Valley was a deeply Romantic layout, the first model railway to exude charm, character, and atmosphere. What it was not was an absolutely precise dimensionally accurate replica of a real prototype.

Ahern did not have access to the same resources as Allen of course. Post War Britain was not a place for luxuries. Consequently almost everything he built was made from scrap materials. Even so, within the limits of what was available to him he produced wonderfully characteristic scenes.

Like Allen, Ahern was also an artist (A Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society). Interestingly in a letter written in 1941 he said:

A fine model is a work of art by virtue of the feeling, knowledge and skill displayed in interpreting something which already exists."

The final modeller I was going to link to is also British. P D Hancock came along slightly later than Allen and Ahern, starting in 1948. Like both he had an eye for the telling detail and for narrative. Unfortunately photographs of his Craig and Mertonford seem to be unavailable online, so instead all I can do is point you to a copy of his book called Narrow Gauge Adventure: Story of the Craig and Mertonford Railway which has lots in black and white.

You don't have to go far on the web or in the streets of our larger cities to find somebody selling what are described in various combinations of 'art', 'print', 'fine art', limited edition' and 'giclee'. What you won't find, at least in any explicit language, are definitions of what these terms mean, even as they are used by the vendor. What you won't find is any up-front acknowledgement that these 'prints' are actually reproductions - in other words copies in one medium of a work initially produced in another.

What you will find is lots of seductive language that appears to be the language of 'art' but is actually the language of marketing, sales and finance. What you will find is lots of misdirection and marketing sleight of hand. The idea of a 'limited edition' is introduced as if that alone is enough to generate not just value but investment value. What you will find is lots of play on words like 'archival' in a context that implies somehow that these terms have a bearing on the artistic value of the piece being sold, not just its physical properties.

To be clear - I have no objection to the principle of making reproductions. My beef is with the claims of the marketing men to be selling 'art'. They are not. What they are really selling is however almost equally fictitious - value.

Describing a work of art as having value has two meanings - artistic value and financial value.

Does a reproduction of a work of art have artistic value? I would argue that that a reproduction is not, of itself, a work of art, it is a copy of a work of art. That means therefore that the reproduction can have no artistic value in its own right, only as a stand in for the original piece. This is a fine philosophical point with which others may disagree. More to the point, it only matters if when you buy a reproduction it is sold to you as having the artistic value in its own right. If you buy it knowingly as a copy and with no such claims, then no one is harmed.

Can a reproduction of a work of art have financial value? The value of an object (as opposed to its cost) is set by what people are willing to pay for it. In a genuine free market that assumes full knowledge of what is being sold and what other options exist. In the context of reproductions this is a big assumption. Most of the marketing of these is not through established routes, but direct to consumers who are probably not fully aware of the language conventions of the art world and so are not aware when those conventions are being subverted by marketing-speak. If we don't try to pretend that these reproductions are investments in art, then the price asked is indeed the value. However, once any hint of them having a lasting value - an investment value in other words - comes into play, this all changes. Investment value depends on goods having a resale value. This is in the art world sometimes called the secondary market.

So, what is the secondary market for these so-called 'limited edition' 'fine art' 'giclee' prints? Look in the auction catalogues for fine art auctioneers. Do you see these offered for sale? Almost certainly not. In truth the only place you will see these prints offered for sale is via the original vendor. The investment value of these reproduction prints is pretty much zero. Their intrinsic worth as 'art' is pretty much zero. They have value but as wall decoration and to a degree as reference pieces. Beyond that - nada!

I'm aware of course that in practice this probably applies to the work of many minor artists, but the artist is not normally interested in what someone else gets when reselling their work, only in what they can get for what they are currently producing.

I know the argument put forward here is contentious. After all, a lot of people make their money - probably a lot more than the artists they claim to 'represent' - from selling these 'fine art' 'prints'. Discussions in in-line fora on these topics usually descend very rapidly into name calling and abuse. I have never seen in any of these discussion any arguments that address the points I have made above. There is lots of disagreement of course - just not much in the way of argument.

So lets try and have a rational discussion on this issue. All comments positive and negative are welcome, but please - play nicely!

I'll leave you with two quotes. The first is from a discussion on Etsy - I'm leaving it anonymous for obvious reasons. I also have no idea if the person making this statement actually thought about the implications of what they were saying.

" I have no desire to label my prints 'reproductions'. I feel it devalues the work."

The second is from an article written from the perspective of the art collector:

"'Real something is always better than reproductions of anything ... Anyone can buy a print of sunflowers by Van Gogh. Having real art is always better energy, even better than reprints of great art.'"