Color in Artists’ Books • Charles Meryon • Stencils on Early Woodcuts • Color in the Age of Digital Reproduction Letter from Montreal • Prix de Print • Treasures from the Vault • Martin Puryear • Dieter Roth • Under 100 • News

The Global Journal of Prints and Ideas September – October 2013

Volume 3, Number 3

US $25

Editor-in-ChiefSusan Tallman

Associate PublisherJulie Bernatz

Managing EditorAnnkathrin Murray

Online ColumnistSarah Kirk Hanley

Manuscript EditorPrudence Crowther

Design DirectorSkip Langer

AssociateIsabella Kendrick

September – October 2013Volume 3, Number 3

In This Issue

Susan Tallman 2 On Color

Sarah Bodman 4Black Books: The Use of Color in Artists’ Books

Thomas Primeau 11Coloring Within the Lines: The Use of Stencils on Early Woodcuts

Jacobus van Breda 17Charles Meryon: Paper and Ink

Jason Urban 23Pattern Recognition:A Letter from Montreal

Carinna Parraman 28Color in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Prix de Print, No. 1 34Justin Quinn: Fallen Chapter 71 or 4836 times E

Treasures from the Vault 36Richard H. Axsom

Ellsworth Kelly’s Red

ReviewsSusan Tallman 39 Martin Puryear

Charles Schultz 42Ian Davenport: Circle Etchings

Amelia Ishmael 43Alain Biltereyst: Untitled

Allison Rudnick 44 The Game-Changing Editions of Dieter Roth

News of the Print World 47

<100 54

Contributors 59

Guide to Back Issues 60

Online: Sarah Kirk Hanley / The INK BlogGold Rush: The Print Market Now

On the Cover: Francis Elliott, cover of Dark Globe (2009 –), altered school atlas, black marker pen. Published by the artist, London.

This Page: Detail of colored and uncolored impressions of Christ’s Entry to Jerusalem from Christ as the Man of Sorrows (fragments) (ca. 1500, France), color woodcut. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, New York Public Library. Photo: Denise Stockman.

Art in Print3500 N. Lake Shore DriveSuite 10AChicago, IL 60657-1927www.artinprint.org info@artinprint.orgNo part of this periodical may be published without the written consent of the publisher.

The series “Treasures from the Vault” was made possible with the generous

support of the IFPDA Foundation.

Art in Print September – October 20132

just ones and zeros. For most practical purposes today, color is the default and black-and-white is an “effect” achieved by clicking the desaturate button.

The ease and access of color print-ing has changed the way artists think about print both in and out of the digi-tal realm. Jason Urban’s report from Montreal (p. 23) documents a city in which artists have seized upon print techniques—primarily screenprint—as a way to color the world. As a technology, screenprint is simply a tweak on the 16th-century stencils described by Primeau, but it is being used to apply ink to every-thing from chipboard to entire building façades.

The new profusion of color, of course, has its own drawbacks. Inkjet has made color printing easy, but not necessarily precise or appealing. On page 28 Carinna Parraman reports on efforts by the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol to adapt commercial digital color to the more meticulous needs of artists.

Meanwhile, in a sea of cheap printed color, black-and-white can now assert itself as a purposeful choice. Sarah Bod-man’s survey of artists books on page 4 takes us on a tour of darkness where we find black as the cosmos, black as the deep, black as weapon, black as armor, black as the inky embodiment of text, black as the veil of ignorance and black as the framing of light.

Finally, in the second installment of our “Treasures from the Vault” series, curator and scholar Richard Axsom takes on the most gregarious of colors and the most virtuosic of contemporary color-ists in his essay on Ellsworth Kelly’s Red (2005) (p. 36). It is a reminder that some-times color is not an add-on at all, but a sea to dive into for all its giddy retinal sensations—sensations that, for what-ever reasons of human neurology, have the ability to transport us beyond the realm of explanation.

Susan Tallman is the Editor-in-Chief of Art in Print.

On ColorBy Susan Tallman

where the material specifics of inks and papers are treated as active contributors to meaning. It can be seen in Ian Dav-enport’s intensely colored Circle Etchings (reviewed on page 42) and Alain Bil-tereyst’s cardboard reliefs (p. 43), and is manifest in the subtle tonalities of Martin Puryear’s ostensibly black and white etchings (p. 39). Justin Quinn, selected by Jane Kent as the winner of the first Art in Print Prix de Print

competition (p. 34) plays on our asso-ciations with the paper colors that lie so unremarked beneath black letters. In all these works color and material are as inti-mately linked as they were for Meryon.

Just a couple of decades ago the divi-sion of the world into black-and-white versus color felt normal. Photographs, movies, television and photocopying were all originally—like prints on paper—black-and-white things to which color was later added as an optional and expen-sive extra. This is the dichotomy captured so effectively in the early work of Dieter Roth, recently on view at MoMA (p. 44).

But digital printing and digital pho-tography have brought about a paradigm shift. To the cameras (phones) we carry, the printers that sit on our desks and the LCD screens on our laptops, it’s all

Color is generally considered a desirable thing. A sign of health. Of spring. Of light at the end of the tunnel. It is how cultures around the world mark the end of mourning and how generations of moviegoers knew Dorothy was no longer in Oz. This auto-matic equation of color with all-good-things may be a little grating for those who love the concision and high stakes of black-and-white prints, drawings and photographs, but the fluid integration of color in man-made objects has been a technological Holy Grail for millennia. Kandinsky, Albers and many others have attempted to codify the power of color in art, but color in print is a different animal from color in painting—or has been until recently. This issue of Art in Print looks at color: color as technology, color as subject matter, color as experience and meaning.

Painters may mix pigments willy-nilly on palette and canvas, but print demands a separation of parts. For centuries the approach to printed color was additive: you began with black or brown ink on paper, then added a second shade and tried to line them up as best you could. Dark line came “naturally” before any chromatic addenda. On page 11 Thomas Primeau sets the stage by examining the early attempts of European art-ists and printers to enliven their images with stenciled color, resulting in a semi-mechanized paint-by-number.

Over the course of subsequent cen-turies, printers continued to search for ways to mimic the chromatic plasticity of painting, but with little success. Etchers and engravers instead saw virtue in the discipline and intensity of black. Yet, as Jacobus van Breda’s account of Charles Meryon’s etchings (p. 17) makes clear, even among the most meticulous (and color-blind) of etching revivalists, color found its way in. Meryon’s fondness for printing on pastel-tinted papers added variety to his impressions, but it can also be seen a forerunner of 20th-century approaches to paper—its texture and color—as a substantive part of the image, not merely a backdrop for other action.

This attitude continues to under-lie most contemporary printmaking,

Multi-pass printing of circular dots from the project “Color Printing 7.0: Next Generation Multi-Channel Printing” in conjunction with Marie Curie Initial Training Networks, the Norwegian Color Research Laboratory at Gjøvik University College and other partners.

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Color in the Age of Digital ReproductionBy Carinna Parraman

Ask a group of artists to mix a brown and they will likely create a range of rich, deep colors. Ask them to describe the color and they might resort to analo-gies such as mahogany, chestnut or choc-olate. Ask how to produce the color with pigments and they could probably break it down in great detail, though their opin-ions might differ. But ask them to describe the same color using the numerical val-ues required in the digital domain and things become problematic. Systems such as red-green-blue (RGB) coordinates; hue, saturation and value (HSV); or L*a*b* (CIELAB) values are terra incognita for most artists, but they are the roadmap of image software, color profiles and “lookup tables,” that drive digital color printers, a core component of today’s dig-ital atelier. The gap between how artists approach color and how it is approached by commercially available digital print-ing systems creates numerous problems: it makes it difficult to predict the look of a printed color, which compromises reproduction and interferes with artistic creativity. In this essay, I examine some of these problems, along with experimental solutions developed at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England (CFPR).1

Most printed images today have spent some portion of their existence on computer screens. Perfect alignment of these two very different modes of being—backlit liquid crystals and ink on paper—may be unattainable. During the recent Patrick Caulfield retrospective at Tate Britain, I visited the bookshop and noticed how radically varied the many reproductions of his works—cards, posters, books, framed inkjet prints—were in their size, color and surface qualities. Reproductions of artwork undergo any number of transformations: from object to photograph to computer screen to ink on paper, often with intermediary steps in film, color separa-tions and photo-offset lithography. On the Internet, it can be difficult if not impossible to know which reproduction is closest to the original, or even whether

there is a shared original. Doug Manchee’s work, 20 Works

of Art in the Age of Digital Replication (200 6–), dramatizes the vari-ability of images we think of as facsimiles. Manchee gathers book illustrations of well-known artworks captured at different resolutions and often cropped to fit different layouts. He scans the reproductions and superimposes them, resizing to align the primary elements of the composition.2 The resulting image—with its slurry of halftone processes, color gamuts, cropping and stretching—clearly pictures the needs of publishers as they attempt to a balance the variables and constraints in available print technologies and costs (Fig 1).

Manchee exploits reproductive infidelity as a subject, but for most artists the difference between the color displayed onscreen and that printed on paper constitutes a technical liability. When it comes to printing carefully crafted digital works, what are the parameters of acceptability?

Specialist print studios have long existed to help artists overcome some of these frustrations and realize their aims. The recent “Just Press Print” exhibition curated by Paul Laidler illuminated the creative relationship between artists and digital master printers.3 Yet such expertise is not always available, leaving one of the central questions for digital printing today: whether commonplace inkjet printers can be transformed into more intuitive and creative devices for artists. A look at how artists actually approach tasks such as color mixing is the first step toward an answer.

The Artist’s Color Palette

The physical mixing of pigments is a negotiation between the appearance of a color in the world, mixing variations on a palette, and comparing the observed appearance to the pigments applied to paper or canvas. An artist might shift the colors to obtain a balance between light and dark or might employ a wide range

of colors for a high dynamic range. The range of decisions will be based on the artist’s formal training, understanding of color theory, interpretation, trial and error, emotion and mood, aesthetic preference and subliminal influences.4

Where color plays a dominant part in an artist’s work, one can often detect patterns of preference. Arthur Buxton collected works from Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Macke, and devised charts that compare their color usage. In Van Gogh visualisation (2011) and Gauguin visualisation (2011) (Figs. 2 and 3), Buxton chose the five most prominent colors in 28 paintings from each artist and showed their proportional relationships in pie charts.5 One can watch the shift in Gauguin’s palette when he moves from cool Europe to saturated Tahiti. Buxton, who has expertise in color wide-format printing, faced two challenges with this work: the production of a visually satisfying new image and adherence to the color values of the original paintings.

Like painting, traditional printmaking processes differ from inkjet printing systems in a number of significant ways. In etching or lithography, colors may be mixed by hand; each color is usually printed from a different template in a different run through the press; multicolor prints require multiple passes through the press; and dark, rich colors can be created by overprinting layers of pigments and translucent glazes.

In commercial inkjet printing, by contrast, all colors derive from a predetermined set of inks, and all inks are deposited simultaneously in a single passage through the printer. The range of attainable colors is dictated by the mixing capacity of the four process colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK) (Fig. 4).6 This can simulate many hues but not complex colors such as burnt umber, nor can it provide the multitude of hues, shades and tints that an artist can mix on a palette by adding opaque whites, translucent bases or media to change the color’s viscosity, texture and transparency.

TECHNOLOGY

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Fig. 1. Doug Manchee, The Creation of Adam from the series 20 Works of Art in the Age of Digital Replication (2007), pigment print, triptych, each panel 44 x 114.5 inches. Edition of 5. Printed by the artist in Rochester, New York.

The limitations of CMYK printing have long been acknowledged. In 1948 the pioneering optics researchers A.  C.  Hardy and F.  L.  Wurzburg sug-gested that “inks may be selected solely on the basis of their color gamut. Their colors need not be cyan, magenta, and yellow; nor is it required that they be transparent. The way is therefore opened for entirely new printing processes.”7

(20th-century attempts to address the shortfalls of CMYK included Hexa-chrome, in which orange and green were added to make a six-color set, and color-matching systems such as Pantone.) Recent inkjet printers often include pairs of process-color inks—cyan and light cyan, magenta and light magenta,

black and light gray—to ensure a smooth tonal gradation from the lightest (1%–5% dot coverage) to the darkest color patch (100%).

Nonetheless, many contemporary artists find the eventual printed colors to be unexpected at best or disappointing at worst. Commercially available hard-ware, software and methods are too generalized and too inflexible to provide the level of precision and predictability artists require. Not all problems can be solved by adjusting the tonal curve or decreasing the cyan channel with a slider bar. Programs such as Adobe Photoshop can be counterintuitive, counter-creative and present unfeasible beyond-the-gamut colors (“gamut” here refers to the

set of all colors displayable or printable by a particular output device).

At CFPR, Melissa Olen8 and I compared traditional methods for mixing and printing color with the color picker tools, slider bars and on-screen methods developed for digital printing. We tested the creation of custom inks that align with an artist’s preferred palette; how inks can be overprinted to obtain colors that are currently out of the scope of inkjet machines; how standard printheads can be replaced with brushes and nibs; how paint might be used in place of ink; and how texture could be incorporated as an integral part of the color mixing and printing process. Each possibility is discussed below.

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Color Palettes

To create colors more representative of what an artist might mix on a palette, we used a spectrophotometer to measure the light reflected from specific pigments and mixed inkjet inks to match, drawing down the ink with a thin wire to emulate the thickness of inkjet-printed ink. We then syringed these bespoke colors into inkjet cartridges and compared the printed results to the drawdown. The printer we used originally employed six inks: cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow and black. We sought to produce light and dark color combinations of each new hue color. As tests progressed, colors and color combinations were fine-tuned, and the printheads were arranged to ensure a smooth transition between light and dark color pairs: thus the cyan and

light cyan pair could be replaced by green and light green or blue and light blue; the magenta and light magenta by a red or an orange, etc.

The next objective was to match the new colors inside the printer to those represented by software onscreen. We used an industry standard color file (TC9.18 RGB) consisting of 936 patches of known color values that when measured by a spectrophotometer provide accurate color profiles for inkjet printers with six or more colors (Fig. 5). The file was printed onto fine-art paper using the newly mixed inks. As the new printed colors did not match the RGB color values seen on screen, we had to measure the printed colors in the chart and map them to the RGB values in the industry standard color file. A printed chart of the custom colors provided a swatch to show how the

printed ink looked on particular papers, and also provided a profile for matching the printed gamut to the onscreen color. The profile can be uploaded to the color Profile Library on the user’s computer and offers a color selection chart that can be accurately viewed in Photoshop. Thus an artist using this system would not only have access to a customized palette of color but could soft-preview the colors on screen and better predict the eventual appearance of the printed ink on paper (Fig. 6).

Multi-Pass Printing

We also looked at how the time-honored practice of printing a single color on each pass through the press might be adapted to inkjet printers, allowing the artist to control exactly which inks were combined and in what order, and generating a variety of color mixtures that could not be achieved by the printer driver software (Figs. 7, 8).

Multi-pass printing allows for greater color saturation: in standard inkjet printing, the maximum ink coverage is determined by the paper’s absorbency, weight and coating. With multiple-pass printings a first pass of 100% ink can be followed by a second layer to increase density and saturation of the color. This is particularly useful with absorbent papers.

Working with the primary channels of a Canon printer (cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue) we printed a layer from one channel at 100% density, allowed time for it to dry, then printed a second color at 100% density over the first, and then a third. The double-layer printings contained all the two-color combinations of the inks (red+red, red+magenta, magenta+red,

Figs. 2, 3. Arthur Buxton, Van Gogh visualisation (2011) and Gauguin visualisation (2011), digital prints, 59.4 x 84.1 cm. Edition of 50. Printed by the artist in Bristol, UK.

Fig. 4. The combination of two of the three process colors cyan, magenta and yellow results in the primary colors of blue, red and green. The combination of all three process colors results in black. (Illustration adapted from Viggiano 1995). S. J. A. Viggiano, “The Legacy of Hans Neugebauer in Color Imaging: A Centennial Remembrance,” Proc. 13th Color Imaging Conference: Color Science and Engineering Systems, Technologies, and Applications (Scottsdale, Arizona 2005) pp.153-158.

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etc.) and the triple-layer printings contained all three-color combinations (red + red + red, red + magenta + magenta,red + magenta + red, etc.), for a total of 256 color combinations. The dots that contain a short line on either side of the colors (-CRG- and -RG-) demonstrate the result when the two or three colors are printed in one pass.

We found that the first printed color remained dominant even when other colors were printed over it, thus magenta-over-green presented a much greener hue than green-over-magenta. (Black was excluded from these experiments.

In commercial printing, black is used to increase contrast and dynamic range, but many artists find it desaturates the appearance of artwork.)

The Application of Texture

One of the most frequent complaints about digital prints is the flatness and uniformity of surface. A recent exhibition at the Design Museum London, “The Future Is Here: A New Industrial Revolution,” demonstrated how artists have been exploiting three-dimensional printing technologies.9 In

the realm of inkjet printing, commercial manufacturers have begun to produce ultraviolet (UV) curable inks (white, gloss, metallic) that can create greater textural variation. Such inks tend to be more robust and scratch-resistant; unlike conventional inks they do not rely on the paper coating to hold them on the surface and can be applied to a wide range of materials, including cardboard, plastic, metal and canvas. It is possible to build surface textures with UV-curable inks by adding layer upon layer to create a surface topography. The layers are created in a vector-based software such as InDesign or Illustrator.

At CPFR we took a third approach, researching possibilities for a 2.5D deposition printer that could produce textured surfaces (Fig. 9). We began with a Roland plotter originally designed for cutting vinyl, whose action can be controlled by computer on three axes—vertical, horizontal and depth—and replaced the cutting blade with a hollow, threaded holder into which different brushes and nibs could be placed and easily interchanged. Paint was dispensed from a syringe and pumped through flexible rubber tubing to the paintbrush. We then experimented with the surface appearance and texture that could be produced by overlaying different colors or by varying the translucency, viscosity and application speed.

A series of 20 x 20 cm modules were generated in Adobe Illustrator,

A

B A B

Fig. 5. TC9.18RGB industry standard color test chart. The color patches outlined in red and labelled as A and B, illustrate the position of each of the primary hue colors with each corner of the square equal to 100% of each color. In the patches in the top left hand corner (A), the hue colors are red, yellow, green. In the patches in the bottom right corner (B), the hue colors are magenta, cyan and blue. A 100% black patch appears at the top left of the (in block A) and a white patch (which contains no ink) can be located at the bottom right (in block B).

Fig. 6. Left: A section of the color chart showing the original CMYK colors. Right: The same section of the color chart showing how the colors would appear when printed using the custom inks. Left: Using the color picker tool in Photoshop, a color patch can be selected. Right: When using color measured data from a custom ink mixed color chart, the same color patch can be soft previewed, therefore assisting in an accurate color selection for the artist.

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each comprising a pattern of vector lines, where each component could be modified, enlarged, rotated or removed. This library of hand-drawn and imported vector-based marks could be copied, cut and pasted into any drawing (Fig.  10). Within the grid we could sample the results of overlaying different patterns and colors, or employing different scales, degrees of force or viscosity of ink.

raking light, and provide insight into the appearance of translucency and opacity from the thickness of the paint and the dynamic movement of brush on paper.

Conclusion

Since their introduction to the market in the 1980s, inkjet printers have become smaller, cheaper and more complex, and now offer a highly sophisticated microprinting system. Nonetheless, from the artist’s point of view, out-of-the-box printing systems have many drawbacks.

Printer manufacturers have concen-trated on the task of reproducing color: taking a complex multicolored screen image and producing a complex multicolored print. For artists, color harmony and color in context are important yet subjective metrics.10 Some prefer mixing colors as a single unit or as part of a limited palette of colors, an approach fundamentally at odds with the millions of colors that are possible in Photoshop.

More fundamentally, manufacturers provide users with a closed-loop system (color management, software, hardware, operating system) where highly colorful or subtle images can be printed in fine detail. This is practical in many ways but discourages the kind of experimental tinkering that is at the heart of artistic creativity. Some artists have developed the technical knowledge to hack software or retrofit hardware to apply color by painting, spraying or dripping pigment onto canvas, paper and other surfaces.11 Many, however, have yet to find a convenient or productive entry point into digital printing.

At CFPR we have worked to find ways of adapting existing technologies to produce alternative approaches for color mixing and printing. By rethinking the relationship between on-screen color mixing and the application of ink to paper, we hope to suggest alternative ways of thinking about image making, printing and color.

Carinna Parraman is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at the Centre for Fine Print Research, University of the West of England.

Fig. 7. Melissa Olen’s multi-pass printing of circular dots, magnified here to approximately three times the size. The dot at the top (-RG-) shows the result when both colours are printed at the same time. The dots below (RG and GR) show the variations of multi pass printing of two separate layers. Fig. 8. Melissa Olen’s arrangement of circular dots, magnified here to approximately three times the size. The dots are arranged around a central dot (-CRG-) where all three channels—cyan, red and green—are printed in one pass. The other dots are printed using three passes. Here one can compare the subtle colour differences.

Fig. 9. Detail of the surface, captured at an angle, showing the application of two layers of ink and working towards a 2.5D surface.

To gain a better understanding of the appearance of texture of applied ink, we illuminated printed samples from the 2.5D plotter with raking light to accentuate details of brushstrokes and the surface texture, and examined them with a digital camera attached to a stereo zoom microscope (Fig.  11). The resulting photographs clearly show ridges of paint, bubbles and the shadows caused by the

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Notes: 1. Research at the Centre for Fine Print Research (CFPR) is directed at the production of physical artifacts predicated on print, relating digital and new-media technologies to physical output and creativity. The Centre’s long-term vision is focused on the development of novel surface print, design and fabrication in two and three dimensions using materials and processes such as 3D rapid, wide-format printing and laser cutting in collaboration with artists.2. www.dougmancheeprojects.com3. “Just Press Print,” Newcastle upon Tyne: Northern Print Gallery, 21 June–10 August 2012.http://justpressprint.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/just-press-print-presents.html (accessed July 2013) and Paul Laidler, “Just Press Print,” SNAP International Printmaking Conference, Bentlage, Germany, 27–30 September 2012.4. John Gage, Color in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006): 87.5.www.arthurbuxton.com/2011/06/gauguin-visualisation.html and http://www.arthurbuxton.com/2010/11/van-gogh-visualisation.html.6. Black is the “key” color, hence the “K” in the acronym. The four-color system evolved from early photomechanical processes: three separate photographs of the image would be taken using red, green and blue filters. These photographs were then inverted to create three negative images and their process-color counterpart: thus a red component in the image produced a cyan separation, green produced a magenta separation and blue produced a yellow one.7. A. Hardy and F. Wurzburg Jr., “Color Correction In Color Printing,” Journal of the Optical Society of America 38, no. 1 (April 1948): 300–307.8. A research associate at the CFPR, Melissa Olen is working on the EU-funded project entitled “Color Printing 7.0: Next Generation Multi-Channel Printing” in conjunction with Marie Curie Initial Training Networks, the Norwegian Color Research Laboratory at Gjøvik University College and other partners.9.designmuseum.org/exhibitions/2013/the-future-is-here10. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).11. Carinna Parraman, “Twenty First Century Color” in Color in the Making: From Old Wisdom to New Brilliance,” (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2013).

Fig. 11. A test sheet of hand-drawn vector lines in Adobe Illustrator (top left) and demonstrating an exploration of different methods of application; (top right) Double cork. At -45° angle (clockwise from vertical); (bottom left) Double cork. At 45° angle (anti-clockwise from vertical); (bottom right) Hog’s hair bristle, small; Scale and orientation: 100%, as original Acrylic—standard mix (2 parts paint: 1 part water); Flow rate: 2 x 10; Paint head force 100.

Fig. 10. Microphotograph of the brush stroke under raking light. The picture sample represents a brush stroke sample enlarged by five times.