Group 6: The Clay Print Assemblages 1985-1989

( scroll over images for titles dates, sizes etc. click to enlarge)

Using picture postcards for my assemblages, eventually I hit a point where I needed to connect to more personal imagery, as the postcard images were intended as souvenirs for tourists. I had the idea then that I should make my own “postcards”, image souvenirs of my own life. I turned to a print technique because I could make multiples of images, the large amount of units needed for working in assemblage. The images I conjured were from personal life like photos of friends, or just what ever I was drawn to.

In the early ‘60s my father invented a printing technique, which he called the “clay cut”. “Clay-cut” referring to the use of clay for a printing surface instead of wood as in “wood-cut”. He flattened modeling clay (plasticene) out in a panel to make the printing plate, then incised marks into the surface to make imagery. Because the clay surface stays relatively soft it was necessary to ink it and bray lightweight paper, all by hand, to make prints. The general effect was that every print was ever so slightly unique. Syd used this roughly calibrated technique to achieve some nice effects in the few prints he made this way.

In late ’84 I was experimenting with the clay print technique and presentation. By the summer of ’85 I had made a number of works. They were comprised of tiling multiple prints. They were larger than previous work as the unit size of the prints was much larger than postcards. I used oil based printing inks and rice paper for the media of the prints and then mounted the assembled group to a canvas or a panel. Eventually I also used water-based colors to stain parts of the rice paper where there was no oil color, a resist between oil and water-based media.

Technically, I could do a few different things to make the editions variable. I could print states, where the plate was inked only once but a number of sheets were pulled off the plate. Each successive print would be lighter until there was no image left. By assembling these prints together in succession I could show in a serial way, the effects of change or time. Or I could continue to ink one area of the plate but let other areas fade, like in the work “ Gleam And Then Pale.” It starts with a starry night and as the sun comes up in successive versions, the stars fade. In this case the sky fades from black to light and the printed white stars become invisible against the lightening sky. Or I could color various areas on the plates differently producing different effects within the same image. An early clay print work was “Life in a Day of the Palm”. It showed the same palm tree at four different times in the day.

A linear way of thinking entered into my assemblage concepts because of the printing technique. This progressed the notions I had had about patterning. With an abstract structure merging with the representational images I worked with, I could show, this process is happening to that individual. I had a narrative, the noun and the verb working together. The assemblages were like short films for me and I could just draw them up, unencumbered by having to deal with photography or projection.

The depiction style that I used to render images was almost cartoon-like, very flat and simple, often with outlined contours. This related to the representational style I had developed in California, which was influenced by artists like Milton Avery, Charles Garabedian, Hank Pitcher, Paul Georges, Steve & Shawn White, Roy Flowler, Gregory Botts, as well as the works of the European neo-expressionists. For me the simple style combined with the roughness of the technique evoked an expressionist feel, as the prints were always textured by the various surfaces produced by the crudeness of the clay plates. This offset and countered the lighter, decorative aspect that patterning the prints evoked.

In other works from this period, it is the shape of the unit that presented the image that was altered. In, “Black Cherry Soda” the same image was cast in a triangle, a square and a hexagon. This challenged the tradition of the frame. Tiling these shapes together, expressed how the same image changed depending on the shape it was presented in, through repetition.

Well into it this period I realized I was creating a large library of images that were the source for the enlarged printed ones. They were the initial drawings on 4 x 6 index cards. Some were line drawings, others were tone drawings done with gray markers. I am up to about a thousand, images. Hats, tools, shoes, jets, guitars, vases, objects of all kinds, hands, bodies, faces, trees, leaves, and on and on, wheel barrows, pine combs, horse chestnuts, chairs, bugs, feathers, combs, mounds, rocks, etc.

While at Hunter, I took a class with Vincent Longo. Vinnie is a master print maker and painter and great to have as a teacher and even more as a kind of spiritual guide. In his class I made transfer prints using my card file of small drawings. In transfers, you make Xerox of things and use acetone to transfer the Xerox to other paper as it’s run through the press. It was a way for me to think out ideas for my larger print assemblages, which had grown to use diverse images and ways to assemble them. My thesis at Hunter talked about how I assembled the diverse images I had created. I started to see the act of assemblage as a personal Tarot deck, a personal oracular image library. Of course I was not going to follow a ritualized order in laying them out nor was I was working from a deck of fixed images and meanings, but the choice of images, the why and wherefore with which I spread them out across the wall, revealed thoughts and aspirations as sure as any oracle could.

{ It was also during the Hunter years (’87-’89) point that I started noticing the posters in the subways. I started to see all imagery as pure desire. The way they were presented in the cases, usually as diptychs, attracted me. I considered them to be close to what I was doing except that these images reflected the collective oracle, the desires of society as a whole, or at least the society of America, of New York. I began an overlapping series of work at this time, which were Polaroids, taken of these diptychs in the subway… they’re next month’s topic.}

The clay prints represented a new period for me, a maturation of various ideas and aspirations. It particularly represented the notion that abstraction and representation could work together. By merging the structures of geometric abstraction, with representational images, I felt I was able to have an expression that was both accessible but also worked on some of those essential levels that abstraction addresses. This mode enabled a metaphorical narrative.

The aspiration to unite had its genesis in my interest in spiritual philosophy, and in particular, it came from the influence of Baha’i philosophy, which I had been interested in since the age of 15. The idea of oneness, so central to the Baha’is and so well elaborated in the Faith’s Literature, very much appealed to me. The declaration of the commonality of essentials while embodied diversely, engenders an inclusive attitude while not diminishing the uniqueness of the individual.

Seeking this kind of balance within the elements of art became a guiding principal. As the work progressed I came to realize that, assemblage boils down to putting two different things together, like the digital reduction that every value is either 1 or 0. The diptych is the pictorial parallel. During this period, I met the Canadian painter, Otto Rodgers. The imagery of Otto’s work had developed from his experience growing up on the plains of Saskatoon where the horizon was ever present. The horizontal divide influenced his compositions. Otto talked about making the two sides of the painting as different as possible. He talked about how we gravitate towards finding the connections between different things, and how the capacity of man was in measuring differences, always seeking connections and oneness but also uniqueness, the unknown.

The diptych presented me with a rich yet succinct form to work out the dynamics involved in diversity and oneness and there are a number of diptychs in this group, although the series contains formats of various kinds. The last works in the series made in late 1989 were the Food / War diptychs. These combined images taken from gourmet magazines of food plates shot in vivid color, with black and white images of war photos. Images of planes being shot, soldiers in the battlefield, rockets firing, etc. These works were obviously influenced by the subway Polaroids I had been taking and by my thoughts about differences and connections.