printmaking is harder than mastering the art of french cooking

I'm reading this great book. When I say great what I really mean is insane. The book is titled Julie & Julia, and is about Julie, a 29 year old semi-neurotic New Yorker who decides to cook all of the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (by Julia Child), in one calendar year. Get it? Julie and Julia...harhar. Then there's all this stuff about her biological clock, her crappy apartment, her crappy job, ect ect. She thinks that cooking all 524 recipes in this book will fix all that is wrong with her life. The thing is that she's not really a good cook to begin with, blah blah blah. It sounds like sort of a chick read, and it probably is. I usually only go for chick movies, but the allure of this cooky cooking woman hooked me from the start. Oh yeah, plus it's a true story, which makes it way more legitimate.

Anyway, to make a long story short, there's this great line in the book:

"The diagrams in MtAoFC (Mastering the Art of French Cooking) are always exciting. You can pretend you're mastering something really daunting, like lithography, or cold fusion or something."

Apparently lithography is of equal difficulty to cold fusion! Which is amazing, because what is cold fusion really? Something nuclear, but well beyond my understanding. I don't know, but I can print you a mighty fine lithograph, and talk all day about the delicate balance of grease and water, so does that mean that I can also "do" cold fusion? It sounds dangerous. I enjoy the fact that this author #1: knows what lithography is, and #2: understands how crazy difficult it is, and #3: has given it a shout out in her book, because all printmakers like to see, in verified type, how difficult printmaking is - as if it makes what we do more valid. Because it does. It really, really does.

What's even better is that I just found out, via the World Wide Web navigation system, that this book will be a movie come April 2009. You know, I am really glad that they make all these great books into movies, because why would people want to sit around and read the printed word all day when they could just watch it at the talkies? Also, for your enjoyment, Meryl Streep will be playing the role of Julia Child. the end.

and we're baaaaaaack!!!!

I could sit around all day with my thumb up my rear parts making excuses for my laxidasical attitude towards this blog, but I won't because you've heard them all before. Now that I am learning how to be a real person again, I am repairing all of my relationships that have suffered while I was devoting myself to the print, this blog being one of them. Running the risk of sounding like a creepy internet nerd, I will stop. Today, I leave this comic, given to me by the greatest studio mate the universe has ever seen. I could not even believe my eyes when these blatant and fairly highbrow printmaking references were made. I hope the writer of the comic is aware that he/she has made my day.

Another expression that has origins in the world of printing was brought to my attention today: "Mind your P's and Q's". Simply enough, going again back to the days of letterpress, this expression comes from the fact that the P and the Q in lowercase are easily confused, especially since printers work with the backwards image of things. Often there would be mistakes where the word might read: comquany, instead of company. Funny, I know. haha.

So Happy Halloween - I spent my day prior to Halloween making glow in the dark skulls and bones out of oven clay. Lame, but great! Today I learned the origin of the expression "out of sorts". In short, a sort is one piece of moveable type (one letter, or punctuation mark). Throughout history printers have been running out of type, and when this would happen they were said to be "out of sorts". Interesting huh?

Black Death responsible for high literacy rates?

Of course, is that even a question? If this doesn't make sense to you, let me explain. It starts with paper. We all use paper, especially the printmakers of the world. Paper is made of trees right? Wrong. Well, not entirely wrong. Cheapie typing paper, ect, is made from trees, yes. But good quality papers are made from pure rag content. That's right my friends, paper is 100% cotton. It has not always been so. Paper, developed in Egypt, was made primarily from papyrus, about 5000 years ago. This flat sheet however, was more closely related to fabric than an actual sheet of paper. The first evidence of mould made paper was around 105 A.D. in China - they had silk screen technology back then as well. China kept that secret pretty well for a while, because these techniques did not arrive in Western Europe until around 900 A.D. With this mould technique, the materials being used were discarded rags, as they were the only good source of cotton. The rags were cooked, and beaten to break down the fibers, and then the resulting pulp was formed into sheets. Back then, there was no technology to support paper being made from the cellulose in trees, and was all cotton instead (this is nicer anyway). Now, when Gutenberg invented the moveable type in the 1450's (see below), the demand for paper rose drastically, naturally. Unfortunately there were not enough raw materials to produce the ton of paper that was necessary to print all of that literature. Thanks to the rats and fleas though, people started dying like mad. Dying people = good source of free rags. Papermakers therefore, would follow the carts around that collected the dead, and before the bodies were dumped into a grave, they would gather all of the clothes and take them back to their paper mills. For a while, it was believed that this only worked to spread the black death even further. If you ask me though, if all of those people hadn't died, Gutenberg would have had nothing to print on, and not as many people would have learned how to read. Could the plague have been divine intervention as a way to procure materials for papermaking? Maybe that's taking it a bit far, but at least we know the facts: Black death = dying people. Dying people = free rags. Free rags = lots of paper. Lots of paper = readily available printed material. Readily available printed material = literacy. Therefore, black death = literacy. See, that wasn't nearly as ludicrous as you thought it was going to be, now was it?

a matter of national urgency

This may not be anything related to printmaking, but I believe it to be a matter of severe social and cultural importance. Yes, that's right, this is about Spree. The candy. Once, I was getting in the car for a bit of a drive, when my driving friend brought along a roll of Spree. "Spree?", said I, "what the fuck is wrong with you?". "They are a great road-trip candy", said my companion. "No, they are an awful candy that is entirely unpleasant, and plagues other countries with war and genocide by even existing! Get those Spree out of the car!", said I. Maybe that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but that's pretty much how it went down, except for that last bit. I just wanted to make sure that the world at large knows how horrible this innocent looking roll of candy really is. It may have a shiny wrapper, and come in appealing colors, but that is just a guise. Once you put one in your mouth, you have about five seconds of anonomyous sweet fruity taste before the candy coating begins to break down and taste like you have a disc covered with rough warts in your mouth. Then, once all of the candy coating has turned bumpy and dissolved off, you are left with a foul white chip that is sour and hard as a rock. Biting it will surely cause tooth damage, and once bitten the sour infestation will make you cringe in disgust. Now, there is a Chewy Spree variety that's not nearly as bad. Quite tasty, in fact. Join us next time for our regularly scheduled printmaking programming.

Picasso, go home.

Today I had relief printmaking on the brain in a bad way. A couple of days ago, I was sifting through the printmaking section at the fine arts library and realized that nearly all the books about relief printmaking were in reference to Eastern works, and techniques. This has since had me a bit fired up. However, that one is going to take the back burner to an issue that has always been near and dear to my heart: the common misconception of the invention of color reduction block printing. Whether using woodblock, or linoleum block, traditionally a new block is cut and used for each color of the print in the entire edition. Reduction printing, "the suicide method", as it is fondly referred to, involves the cutting and printing of one whole block across the entire edition before cutting the same block further and printing it over the first layer with a different color. This is pretty much the greatest printing process that exists. Nevermind that, it IS the greatest. All biases aside though, the deal is that Picasso is generally credited with the invention of this method. Now, when I was in my early days of falling in love with print media, I did some research about Alfred Sessler, a printer from Madison, Wisconsin. Through my search, I found statements that claimed his invention of the reduction method before Picasso. It was thought that because of Picasso's widespread "fame" that he was credited instaed of Sessler. This made me want to punch Picasso's lights out for needing to take the credit for everything on Earth. So, I've been living these past few years believing Sessler to be my underdog hero. I would imagine fake boxing matches between Sessler and Picasso where Picasso would try to play dirty by pulling a knife on Sessler, but Sessler would still wipe the floor with Picasso's guts just by fighting fair and square. I was confident that I knew the real truth. Tonight however, I decided to do a little more poking, and what I found out is quite interesting indeed. I found a brilliant and well sited paper about this very issue. I read through it eagerly, expecting to be validated about the Sessler theory. As I read on however, even Sessler was discredited with this invention. Although there are some publications claiming Sessler to take the cheese, there was a printmaker by the name of Murray Griffin who was working in Australia around 1935. Evidence supports his use of this process prior to both Sessler and Picasso who were both working around the 1940's and 50's. It turns out though, that Griffin doesn't win either. In 1899, Gaugin used the reduction technique. There may have been printers that "invented" it before he used it as well. This was slightly disheartening for me to learn, but at least now I know the facts. In the case of color reduction and the Tootsie Pop I guess "the world may never know".

If you want to read this paper, which I know you do, here it is: http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/Databases/Bibliographies/tabid/62/frmView/Record/itemID/128020/Default.aspx?Showtext=bibE8826.html