Sandy
Walker: So I really
wanted to ask you about different printers that you have worked with.
I was hoping that you could pick out a few individual printers to
talk about, or even just talking about one printer would be
great.
Alex Katz: Well, I
ended up working with Doris Simmelink,
and her husband, Chris Sukimoto. They were really quite
fine--actually fantastic--to work with. Doris understood what I was
trying to do. All the prints we've done there have been technically
experimental. She's added a great deal to my knowledge of what I can
do as an artist. You can't really separate the printing from the
product, you know. The technique is a big determiner of the
esthetics.
It's similar in painting. One of the interesting things to me
about printmaking is coordinating the esthetic with the technical,
and pushing it out into areas where people haven't been before. Doris
is fabulous and her husband is a fantastic partner. They work very
patiently in order to make the print absolutely as good as possible.
There was one print that we brought up for proofing twenty-six times
while the edition was probably thirty. So there were almost more
proofs than there were prints in the edition. I was satisfied with it
at the seventeenth proof. I thought it was done. But she thought she
could get it better, so she went and proofed it seven more times.
Now, that is quite unusual for a printer.
She also introduced me to other techniques that we could use. I
wanted something that had the immediacy of a pen line, which is very
difficult to get. But she knew what I wanted and kept trying to get
at that. We were sending plates back and forth, I was in Maine. We
were working on a big tri-colored etching portfolio, and we were
trying to get a line that was fluid. Finally we found a way to do it,
and it was a new thing: the kind of thing that most people wouldn't
even notice, but with a nice fluid line. I hadn't seen one like that
before.
SW: Could you be
more specific about your techniques. What about those twenty-six
proofs?
AK: Those twenty-six proofs were on a print that
nobody thinks of. It was for New Years Eve. Like the painting New
Years Eve, and it's all red. And it had to do with color and edges,
and the thinness of the ink. If the ink is too thick it doesn't work.
The thickness of the ink and the color have to be perfect. It's most
difficult when you are putting together a three- to four-color
etching and you are putting wet ink into wet ink. And so the colors
change. And if you change the order of the plates, the colors will be
different. It's incredibly demanding. Great big aquatints are real
hard. And very few people can make them look good. She's a terrific
printing unit.
You have an idea of what you want a print to look like and the
printer has to figure out how to do it. A good printer can anticipate
what you want to do, and make suggestions that you wouldn't have
thought of.
I work with Chris Erikson. I've worked with him on woodcuts. He's
really technically fantastic. He was at the same level as Simmelink.
I did some lithos with him . He did one that was four-by-six feet,
but his press could only handle four-by-four feet. So he seamed it.
And put a silkscreen over it. And I defy you to find where the seam
is, you just can't see it. It's like technically out of sight.
SW: Do you often
work with printers through correspondence?
AK:
Well, I did with Doris Simmelink on the Greeley
thing, but I've been working with her for ten years or so.
SW: So that was
possible because the two of you understood each other so well?
AK: Yeah.
SW: Would you
describe printers as collaborators?
AK: Yeah, definitely, it's a collaboration.
SW: I'm curious
about what your attitude is towards collaboration, because in your
painting you alone are very much in charge?
AK: When you collaborate, you sort of get a
double energy. You get a little more energy. If I were restricted to
what I could do technically, the stuff wouldn't have that energy. It
takes a lot of people. It takes six hours to make one print, you
know? It's beyond my imagination, how anyone could do it by
themselves.
In painting I don't want anyone else. When your working with other
people or with other elements you get a kind of energy that you can't
get in a canvas. It's a collaboration, but I'm definitely the boss.
I'm still saying to the printer "lighter" or "darker."
SW: You often
seem to make prints from your paintings...
AK: It was like art, making my paintings into
reproductions. That was the idea of prints to me. It's not a painting
but, sometimes a print will start from a painting or the dominant
color in a painting like red. Sometimes we'll take the painting right
into the print studio.
Prints can have energy to hold down a wall the way paintings do.
As objects, you know? Prints are thought of different now than they
used to be. They never used to take the place of a painting on a
wall. Prints were smaller. The old ones, like say, Rembrandt whose
prints made him famous in Italy because they were able to go all over
the place--the dissemination of images. Since the sixties though,
prints have been made to hold down a wall like a painting.
SW: Do you ever
like your prints more than the paintings.
AK: Yeah, I think some of my prints are better
than my paintings, like some sketches are better than the paintings.
SW: Is there any
image you can name where you think the print wins?
AK: Well, Luna Park is one of my most famous
paintings. I made two prints of Luna Park, made it the same size, and
we couldn't get the colors right. Brice Marden was the color-mixer at
the time. The two of us were working these colors. We never got the
colors right. But the print was spectacular. I liked it as much as
the painting. Chiron Press made it ten years later, we got the colors
right, and it wasn't as good. It was a kind of a peculiar thing.
SW: I appreciate
hearing you talk about the relationships you've had with printers,
and the process of collaboration which is involved.
AK: It's definitely a collaboration. I couldn't
make prints without them, you know. They're way more talented than I
am in this area. Those printers are really quite incredibly gifted
artisans. Incredible artisans. They take pride in trying to do well.
They all want to do something they haven't done before, with me or
with anyone else. They make very different prints for different
artists. They have to. Definitely, it's a collaboration, but I have
to sign it.
SW: Do you find
that printers are an unusual kind of person because they do this work
but really don't get promoted all that much?
AK: Well they have their reputation in their
fields. It's a big field.
SW: Most people
are kind of religious about what part of the process the artist does
and what part the printer does. You don't seem to be concerned
though.
AK: No, not at all. You end up making up the
rules as you go along. I don't really care about the process. I mean,
it's not important to me who does what.
SW: But you are
interested in experimentation in printmaking?
AK: Well, it's mostly about how the
experimentation can affect the aesthetics of the end product. It's an
esthetic thing. Take etching. The problem with etching is the edges.
Goya had that problem in his aquatints. He would hide the edges of
the aquatints with line or overlaps. But, you can see in the early
ones the edges were more visible. As he experimented more, he learned
different ways to hide the edges. It was an aesthetic decision.
SW: It seems that
aesthetically you are motivated to make prints that look like
paintings, instead of allowing the look of their own processes
dominate. Is there a kind of, say, postmodern motivation in wanting
one medium to look like another, not like itself?
AK: No. It's not like I'm out making a postmodern
object, I just thought I wanted them to look like the paintings. I
didn't want a hard edge. The thing of the purity of the medium, it's
not a concern to me.
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