Jennifer D Anderson

Aardvark Press

Although Aardvark Letterpress and Fine Art Editions is just twelve miles inland from Santa Monica, the journey can easily take over an hour to complete. The press is located just a few blocks away from Mc Arthur Park. An area of Los Angeles where dualities often collided, as gang members and police officers alike have commented violent acts silhouetted against the natural beauty of the area and the outlines of luxury condos just a few blocks further east. In this neighborhood and honestly in any other, Aardvark is a jewel, an example of the innovation and hard work behind a successful American dream as well as the quality and beauty of a handmade, hand printed item. 

Before Aardvark was a press it was a typography company with an employee named Luis Ocon. An expert typographer and linotype operator who had emigrated from Mexico to pursue a better life, Luis jumped at the opportunity to purchase the company in 1978.  With a great deal of foresight Luis decided within two years to change the focus of Aardvark to printing and purchased his first press.  As the computer was radically altering the world and making hard type quickly become obsolete and antiquated, Luis was establishing Aardvark as the premier letterpress shop in the Los Angeles area and so ensured the longevity of his business.

Brooks Ocon, master pressman, designer and Luis’ son, emphasizes the quality and possibility of the letterpress process in both commercial and artistic practices, and his expertise is heightened by the shop’s extensive facilities including a linotype machine, two Ludlow typesetting machines along with their Chandler and Price and Heidelberg presses. This equipment combined with the expertise and knowledge of their staff reflects in how Aardvark creates letterpress work that fully exploits the physical qualities and dimensionality of the process.
 
As the company decided to focus a portion of their energies and resources to fine art publishing, they did so with the hopes of introducing these same qualities to the work of fine artists. Their first project a series of prints based on the 54 card deck of loteria began as a celebration of Aardvark’s 30 anniversary. But once the project was begun, the brothers realized they were doing something that was unique in its own rights and certainly within the spectrum of printmaking within LA.

The popular Mexican game of chance, so common place, so iconic serves as a perfect symbol for both the cross-cultural diversity of LA as well as for the collaborative process of printmaking as a whole. The press selected LA based artists and designers asking each to create a new interpretation of a selected card. Here is relief printmaker Dave Lefner’s classically nostalgic card number 23, El Inverso, and comic strip creator Sammy Harkham’s cool and refined card number 26 Domingo.

 Dan McCleary’s card number 0 Le Calavera reflects his skill as a draftsman and Cristia Pedron’s number 38 El Tiroteo reflects on her abilities as a designer to a give form and poetry to something as unattractive as the reality of a drive-by-shooting. As the press is working on continuing and extending this project, they are making clear a process that could be seen as vintage is indeed as relevant as ever.

Angeles Press

Also on the west side of the city, Angeles Press is located in a row of shops in an area of Santa Monica that was just beginning to boom before the recent economic down turn.  The glass windows of each store and business along Ocean Park Boulevard allow passers-by a glimpse inside and at number 1616 it is the large litho press that catches the attention and surprise of most. This is the fourth location for Angeles Press and in talking with Toby and Mary, they presented its history as punctuated and happily defined by every recession since it's founding making it apparent they are optimists as well as committed printmakers.

Tobey Michel is different from most master printers who run and operate a small press, as he will quickly and in no uncertain terms declare he is not and has never been an artist. His talents and passion lie in the collaboration, the dance of give and take the master printer has with an artist. He took lithography, as the last three credits he had to complete as an undergraduate and like most students had no idea what he was really registering for, but fell in love with the process. He went on to study architecture at Harvard and when laid off from work during the recession of the 1970's, he decided to return to what he smilingly referred to as a recession proof business, lithography.  

In 1976, Tobey started the master printers program at Tamarind with Mary there as a curatorial fellow.  It was the gas crunch of the late 1970's and its impact on commuting across the city that forced Tobey and Mary to become self-employed in order to use their training and pursue their passions. Taking the risk, they founded Angeles Press in 1980.  Mary quickly went and purchased a large wall calendar like the used at Tamarind to designate when artists and clients would be in the shop. With their empty calendar on the wall, the pair quickly realized the one of the hardest tasks they would face, as a new press would be filling it.

Like so many other shops, Angeles Press hit a pinnacle point in the 1980's a decade that found them in their largest space, with five employees and working with a variety of well-known artists, in particular Jim Dine.  Dine, known for his often-harsh words for master printers, has commented favorably on how Tobey will try anything and runs a  “terrific operation at Angeles Press.” Ironically, they state almost of their publishing in the past almost thirty years has been done for non-profits, such as the Frostig Collections a non-profit that sells multiples to benefit social skills education in children with disabilities, institutions and organizations like The Academy of Motion Pictures, individual artists and New York galleries. Their hesitation to say they have never printed for a gallery in LA seems to lay in the fear of both the meaning and impact of that statement.

After 30 years of printing, Tobey and Mary are again taking risks.  The physical strains of printing and working with the chemicals needed for lithography, along with increases in reliability for large format inkjet printers has led them to compliment their work in traditional printmaking with a foray into the digital world. And in treating the computer as another printing tool, the pair feels they are collaborating with artists in a similar way.  Tobey refers to it as controlled abandon; using his skills and knowledge to allow artists to create prints in a way that has a natural ease suited to their working habits and artistic goals.  

Josephine Press

Located a little past Cloverfield on the Santa Monica Boulevard, Josephine Press is unassumingly wedged between a BMW dealership and an acupuncture office. A transplant from the East, who got his MFA at Kent State University, John Greco  established the press in 1984 out of a desire to help other artists and himself, as according to John, the Santa Monica area in the early 1980’s did not have an adequate facility for artists to create prints. Today the shop is a resource for many and with his busy schedule John finds almost no time to make his own work.

Josephine Press is a modest but comfortable shop, with two presses, a large format Epson printer and everything an artist could need stored within its shelves. John keeps the shop versatile, working with artists in almost all print media. This versatility has been the key to the press’ survival over the past twenty-five years. As in his words John cannot find the balance between the processes of making and marketing art.  Without a steady income for the sell of prints, John, like many other artists and entrepreneurs, has developed multiple strategies for generating income and staying afloat even in volatile times.  

John has taught printmaking at Santa Monica College for years and his teaching also extends to Josephine Press where he teaches a variety of workshops. The most interesting on the agenda is a weekly Thursday night workshop that allows any interested artists to use the shop and John’s knowledge for three and a half hours needing only to bring paper, their plates, and the minimal fee of $25.  This open door workshop is unique and perhaps the only of its kind outside of a community college setting in the LA area. On any given Thursday night the diversity of this group is amazing and can range from graduate students from Claremont programs, to an education specialist from the Getty to a local special education teacher all in queue to use the press.  After working with John in his formal workshops, artists can also rent the shop for a day, or evening and in the past months John has been able to rent out the shop for 3 or more days a week meaning that someone is there working at almost all times.

The concept of community is important to John and it can be easily be seen in both his desire for artists to use his shop and in how he is always drumming up new members for the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. Thus said it is easy to understand why John has developed strong relationships with many artists as a master printer over the past twenty years. And those who keep returning include Michael C. McMillan whose work you see here, Nancy Regelman, Joe Piasentin and Ruth Leaf, herself the author of a text on intaglio processes.

The print you see now,  “One More Line” was Raymond Pettibon’s contribution to an exhibition of intaglio prints by a selected group of the artists John has worked with over the years. Perhaps David Pagel summed the press up best in his essay for the exhibition “artsy hotbeds are the stuff of Hollywood movies, and what I found when I went through the Dutch door at the entrance to Josephine Press was even better: a lively beehive of art-lovers driven to do it themselves.”

 

Printmaking in Los Angeles – Printed Strata – The lesser know and unknown

Los Angeles stretches across a vast geographic, demographic and cultural expanse resulting in a city without one nucleus or Mecca. Rather, the multiple points of reference of the Los Angeles are reflected in how it is a decentralized city with a phlera of nuclei, each a hub of energy, excitement and most often art. Arguably this affects the habits of all of LA’s citizens, especially her artists and creative professionals.  In this presentation, I am focusing on how printmaking in Los Angeles is like the city itself varied, dynamic and decentralized. The vantage point I have chosen to use is that of the small presses and the master printers who often own, as well as direct, these shops that are randomly dotted across Los Angeles County.

I have selected this frame of reference due to how unlike the larger more well known presses of Los Angeles, the smaller presses, by nature and out of need to survive interact with a audience of artists ranging from blue chip to unknown and so develop more variety in their means of exchange and dialogue about printmaking and are often places for innovation, education and simply access to the media.  These places and people clearly make their mark, with inky fingerprints on the lives and careers of many artists and contribute in their own ways to the artistic fabric of LA.  I am presenting a small selection of presses that vary in their philosophies, approaches and history. So join me, as we make our crawl down the 10 corridor from the beach areas of Santa Monica to the far east reaches of Los Angeles County.