The first stop was the studio of Charles Lahti. This studio was a very tiny place in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Charles Lahti is a very interesting person. He told us about how printmaking, and painting, were always a part of his life. He started collecting prints when he was a child, buying them for a few dollars a piece. He got to work with many master printers, such as Rauschenberg, Liechtenstein, and Warhol! It really was an honor to be able to visit his studio and meet him. As I said, his studio is very tiny; one main work room, one back room filled to the ceiling with screens and canvases, and a bathroom/wash-out room. The studio doesn't have any fancy industrial equipment. For exposing screens, they just used four photo lights. He admitted that he needed to outsource for printing images, because he was basically computer illiterate. There were two assistants there, one was actually a SUNY Purchase alumnus, who said were really helpful to him when it came to silk screening.
He was a very honest, to-the-point kind of guy. He told us that he had recently gotten into doing more commercial art; making prints into gift boxes and wrapping paper. He also told us that a lot of the time he just barely is able to pay the rent on his studio. I thought his honesty with us was really great. It was better to hear what it was like to be living on your art and how to find other ways to make due but still do what you love.
The second stop was the Bushwick Print Lab. This was located on the border of Bushwick, Brooklyn and Queens. The studio focuses on silk screening. This studio was located in a beautiful building that was at one point a residential apartment building. The studio has two flat silk screen tables and two or three apparel tables. The walls were at least 10 feet tall, stacked to the ceiling with thousands of screens and a ton of inks and other supplies. The building also had a shared balcony where artists can go eat, smoke, or just get some fresh air. This balcony had the most amazing view (pictured below):
The studio and the people working there really didn't impress me that much. The manager, I guess you can call him, seemed a bit pretentious. He kept talking about the same things over and over again, making sure to drop names and show off this vast knowledge of everything. Yet not really giving us any insight about the studio itself. Also, he barely spoke to the class unless Bill reminded him we were standing there filling his studio. As a whole, aside from that beautiful view, I was not very impressed by the Bushwick Print Lab.
Our last stop was the studio of Dennis McNett, the man behind Wolfbat Studios. This studio was like a breath of fresh air to me (after finally catching my breath after climbing 4-5 flights of stairs to get there). Dennis works with woodcuts and linocuts, which I was really excited to see because that's what I like to focus in. It was also really cool to see that he's not just making prints, but turing his print into sculptures, which he uses in performance art. His woodcuts are extremely impressive. I was lucky enough to see a few that were still in progress. The wood appeared to be MDF, which I'm not a fan of, and are very large scale. I was very inspired going to this studio, and I can't wait to have room to do massive woodcuts of my own.
Dennis seems like a really great guy. He was very down to earth and treated us all as his peers, even though he's pretty big in the print world and now in the skate/fashion world (making prints for Vans shoes and graphics for skateboards and snowboards. He was very amusing to hear talk about his work. I loved the back story behind the concept of wolfbat. Here are a few pictures I took during this visit:
- a huge pile of beautiful prints
-awesome sculpture
- woodcuts in progress
Yes, Charles was awesome, wasn't he? I can't get over how generous he was. But I have to warn you, if that studio seemed tiny...brace yourself.
ReplyDeleteAfter meeting him I was kind of disappointed with Bushwick Print Lab too - but I just think it goes to show the different kinds of personalities that you encounter in the art world. On one hand, you have Charles, a very open, giving person who's really excited to meet new people and talk about his experiences with them, and on the other hand you have someone like Ray, who's a nice guy, but is not that interested in teaching except as part of his business model.
As for Dennis, I'm glad you took note of the fact that his work doesn't just stop with the prints, but moves out into other kinds of making, from sculpture to performance. For me it's really important for printmakers not to feel "trapped" inside the medium, as they often do, but to let the work grow and move out into other areas as the ideas expand. More than anything else, he really reminds you how important it is to have a lot of energy and to throw it all into your work.