Trying to make a print / point
I moved to Milwaukee in the Final Days of The Onion’s printed edition. I thought I would drink a lot of beer and party, but that didn’t last long. I was 29. I had lived in Seattle through my 20s. Fantastic, but who cares. I moved to Milwaukee to start a print shop. I started it. It came together gradually and only recently with the acquisition of certain presses has it become a “complete” shop.
I chose Milwaukee because I admired its character. First things I noticed: minivans parked on the curb, and families dancing around. People were out all over the place.I wanted to be the hub of a wheel of letterpress when I moved out here, but I didn’t have the insight or means to pull that off. Now, I’m part of the printing community, but I’m no means the hub. Which is great, because there’s a lot of us. A whole tradition of us all around Wisconsin. I’m thankful to all those folks who helped me find the resources I needed to set up.
I managed to build the print shop that I wanted in my 20s. It took me 13 years to put together, but it exists to make the posters I wanted to make. I bought whatever equipment I could afford or get close to, but I never had big piles ready to spend. My first purchase was a single used drawer of 48pt alternate gothic purchased on Ebay. I purchased a shopping cart filled with 30 year old cans of ink at auction in Wausau, a glider trim-o-saw from a dismantled union print shop in Rock Island, and a platen press from a home garage on Milwaukee’s north side. I bought a guillotine paper cutter from one of my students. The wood type was on loan to me from a friend. It happens slowly, but the equipment accumulates the longer you stick with it.
I left Seattle to learn how to build my own shop. I used to volunteer at this zine library in Seattle that was part of a larger nonprofit. One day, the larger nonprofit decided to kick out all the zine library volunteers. That meant no more workshops, cataloging, or events. I hated the feeling of having my labor taken away. The community of artists and writers we had formed and the usefulness of the zine collection made the zine library a beloved resource and gathering place. But it was taken away. This is why it’s important to me to have my own shop.
All images courtesy N. Adam Beadel
Speaking honestly, as an artist living in Milwaukee, I wish I felt more connected. Sometimes what I want most is to be alone, to put trouble aside and make time for artistic expression. Both desires are true. I have to do most of my work alone. I have to write by myself. I have to carve by myself. I have to print by myself. I do like it, though. It’s calming. I come out of the shop when someone calls upon me for my services, but I don’t market myself. I let the prints do their work with people, and I hope that’s enough. I try to keep things simple, to a point that is definitely compulsive. My customers trust that what I make will be what they're hoping for, and some give me the freedom to make artistic posters.
One of my favorite posters I’ve ever made gave instructions on how to hypnotize yourself. I love that poster. Printed in red and black. Really, that poster taught me how to set type in a system that put me in charge of all my choices. I’m constrained by my limited technology, but there’s total freedom within that. I didn’t reinvent the wheel, but I rewired my approach to text, and my customers trust what I make. I will attempt the instructions on the poster when I see it again. I never used the self-hypnosis methods when I printed them since they were sort of tongue in cheek. But they should work.
Last February, I hosted an art show of typographic broadsides, original letterpress prints based on my manuscript of word-to-image and image-to-word poems. I still need to publish the full manuscript, but I was hopeful that my poems would translate well using big wood type. It was my first time using my latest press, the Showcard Sign Press that came from the last Sears at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois. My friend alerted me to its sale, and I drove down the next day. Those presses were used for making SALE or CLEARANCE signs, and you used to hear about them all the time. So I moved around every dollar I had left and bought it. It came with a tube of Sears Brown printing ink and lots of Helvetica. I had a blast.
Letterpress is an absurd profession, but it hearkens back so directly to the history of print, that hundreds of years of publishing is there for me to inspire my efforts. The peace of carving images from blocks of wood. Setting lead type, in all the styles you never see except in print collections. It’s slow, careful, methodical work. You can work tight and mimic old styles, or work loose and break the rules. If I had more stiffness in my backbone, I would run a letterpress factory like in those creative commons-cleared black and white images of letterpress printers from the past. It’s a system of making that requires creativity and problem solving. The message, the image, and the object of the poster are one thing.
People can do it, of course. Your printmaking dreams are your own. I took an Intro to Printmaking class in community college and was impressed. I really love to carve, print, and share. I gave my prints away. When I realized antique presses existed that allowed you to mix carvings in with text, I felt like I discovered the personal computer.
Meanwhile, the world of printmaking is way bigger than just letterpress and woodcuts. Thank goodness for all the intaglio methods and lithography, chemical and hand engraving. Acetone transfers, monotypes, all the photographic methods, risography and screen printing. Throw in all the ways computers, CNCs, and lasers sweeten the pot. The adjacent disciplines of bookbinding, papermaking, writing, illustration, graphic design, and storytelling make printmaking a rich field to be a part of. So there’s an initial investment in education, in order to learn what you enjoy making, and then an accumulative, long-term investment for equipment and studio space. Printmaking techniques like intaglio and lithography are harder to get access to. Screen printing and relief prints have a lower barrier for entry. Book binding is especially affordable, comparatively, but letterpress is difficult unless you have a shop or squat in an institution that does.
I wanted to be like my mentors. One is a printer and has an amazing shop. The other is a painter who now fishes everyday. Both operate by the rule that your studio should have everything you need to make what you make. You have to be able to move immediately on your work, and there’s always something new to be made.
The conceit of contemporary art is that works of art are objects that act upon us, and live inside our perception and experience of them. We give these objects the amassment of our interpretations in our imaginations, long after the object was made, and sometimes long after we first see it. The meaning found in a work of art is never exhausted by one person’s experience of it. Instead, it has the potential to act on people living in different eras and mean different things. It’s quite spectacular, what art can help you consider.
I think the way our tools act upon our creative efforts is similar. My presses are 40, 60, and 80 years old, and the letters are carved from wood or cast in lead. They wear down, and letters get lost. I feel like this is the most direct way that I can write. I give a unique presentation to the word and image simply by playing with systematically sized blocks. Everything must be measured in familiar points and lesser known pica, which are 1/6th of an inch. Points ascend in multiples of 6 and 12, and range from 6-72 point type. Usually. With wood type, picas typically start at 4, 5, 6, and move by 2s from 6-12, 15, 18, 20, to 24, and then by 5’s. Twenty-five, 30, and so on. There’s a lot of addition, subtraction, and a little division. Then you clean them off and bring them back into print.
No doubt most people prefer the ease of word processors. Antique equipment and specialized training has to prove itself in the digital era. Luckily, there will always be people who appreciate the old stuff. It’s great, keeping it all alive and working. When you get the hang of the system, you can really do a lot of fun things with it. There’s no limit to your creative choices, though the tech is primitive and mechanical. That’s yet another one of the challenges to performing at letterpress and printmaking well. A letterpress form and an image file are not built from the same ingredients.
Artists drawn to cleanliness, order, repetition, storytelling, illustration, and finding patterns are all good pupils of letterpress. Learning to use composition sticks, building forms, and using reglets, line and letter-spacing, furniture, quoins, keys, and chases demystifies graphic design at the computer. In the shop though, you're working in fixed spaces with a fixed medium designed for laying out text on a page. Freedom is possible, but usually at the cost of traditional methods.
When I was younger, I insisted on following this 50-years past obsolete technology. However many years ago, I recorded a segment for NPR as part of their series Low Wage America. The fella opened with, “Where do you find a zine writing roller skating barista? In Seattle, of course! Meet Adam Beadel.” They found me through the zine library. At that time, I had just begun working in relief, making linocuts and my own prints. I was writing poems and making artist books. I had a passion for all of that. I still do. Language is misleading, and yet it’s all we have.
These days when I counsel printmaking students, I always recommend this: if they want to be a printmaker, they need to buy their own equipment and build their own studio. Until they are sure they want to do that, they should seek out the artists who will teach them and give them access to a print shop. Yes, they can find community shops that let them use their equipment. They can go back to school, or teach at a school and get access to that equipment. You can join and bring up a printing community that way. But if you purchase your own equipment and can find a place to put it and work, you’ll be able to make whatever you want at all times.
Like anything else a person cares about for decades, if not centuries, it gets complicated. Printmakers also need concrete slab floors or reinforced joists to support their presses. The practice is handed down by traditionalists, and so the medium seems strict and rule-bound, often limiting itself to the color black, as just one example. Printmakers seek to make art in a field developed to create images for pilgrims and merchants. The production of maps is just as responsible for printmaking as early card games are. Each technique available today had its big moment and promoted that era’s values. Now these all stand in reserve for the artist, ready to be wielded and queered by today’s ideas and materials.
The very basics of how we promote and distribute knowledge comes from this physical action. And then to create more than one! To have it be beautiful each time! For the image to come out of some heavily worked substrate! To know that the image and words are ready for your audience because we slowed down and made sure the arrangement was on the mark.
No pressure. Over and over, the allure of printing is the falling into the repetition of successful habits.
