1 Week at Directangle Press

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last week in New Hampshire, doing an artist residency at Directangle Press. Directangle is run by my friend Josh Dannin, who I met last summer while I was a teaching assistant at the Wells College Summer Book Arts Institute, and I was really excited to finally be able to visit. I wrote the proposal for the residency almost a year ago, and it was really the first time I had done any sort of formal writeup about the Ogham of the Northeast. Beyond the fact that I wanted to make an art book, I didn't really have any specific vision of what the project would look like when I wrote the proposal—and as of a few weeks ago while I was preparing to finally do this residency, I still didn't. It was a little intimidating walking into that experience without an actual plan of what I wanted to work on or accomplish while I was there, but I reckoned that part of the point of doing a residency was to let yourself be inspired by the change of scenery and routine. You can't really experiment or innovate if you're too tied to a prescribed idea; it's stifling to creativity. So much of what I work on in letterpress is meticulously planned out—honestly that's one of the things I like about it!—but that's why I think it's important to me to give this idea more room for creative freedom and expression.

Actually, I think that idea really influenced the direction that I've decided to take the project. I didn't want to have to prescribe out an idea and make a bunch of creative decisions before I'd even started work on it. So, I didn't!  I decided that the book's dimensions will be 5x7, and I decided to commit to a binding method that will allow me to bind a stack of single sheets without the use of folded signatures. (There are a few options I'll be able to weigh for that when the time comes.) But it's important because now I can start making individual pages (5x7 prints) without knowing exactly how they'll fit into what eventually becomes the book. I can catalogue them and save them to fit together like puzzle pieces later (and I like that they'll end up serving as a historical record later of my art styles and inspirations over time). So, that's exactly what I did!

Yep, that's a neat little pile of everything that I accomplished in one week at Directangle Press. It was extremely satisfying getting to organize all my prints into these little 6x9 manila envelopes at the end of the week, but it also felt... deceptively small and compact in contrast with the amount of work I had put into it. But actually, I feel like I accomplished a hell of a lot. I had a soft personal goal that I'd feel good if I could make a half dozen pages, and as you can see, I smashed past that. So it feels like it has been a great kickoff to the project, and as such I want to go through everything I made. After all, this is a historical record of the project, and these are the very first pages of it that were made.

The very first thing I worked on was this letterpress page, which ended up being the only thing I made solely on letterpress. It's not directly about a tree, but it felt sort of nice to start off with an homage to my own press name, and it tied in with the first tree I was starting with, the birch (as discussed in my last post, written while I was there). This is a 2-strike letterpress print, where both layers are split fountains; the background is black/orange/red and the text is green/gold. It was made on handmade paper with straw inclusions. It has a lot going on but, I think, in a good way. Fire ecology is rather rooted in chaos. I want the book to both start and end with a fire—after a disruption, the cycle of ecological succession begins with the pioneer trees and continues through the stages until equilibrium is achieved, and then ultimately disrupted again. So I think this first page I made will go very near to the beginning of the book.

Speaking of pioneer trees and the beginning of the book, the next page I already shared in my last post about birches, but here it is again.

One color risograph (blue) that I made on the scan bed with a piece of paper birch bark and construction paper. I honestly can't believe how happy I am with how the scan of the bark turned out. It has so much texture, I almost can't believe it's printed with a single color. This was my first time combining risograph and letterpress in the same print, which I think is something I will be doing a lot of in my future, because I feel so good about how this came out. I love the look of the metallic silver letterpress on top of the blue riso ink. Also my first time using Springtide Press' daredevil furniture, and the design and spacing came out great too. Feels great when everything falls together perfectly. This, obviously, is the title page for the section about birch, which will be the first section, so I started off pretty strong with the very beginning of the book.

The next two pages I did were both 2-color riso prints of photographs I'd taken of leaves. The first is a photo of a pin oak that was taken last summer, one of my very favorite trees in Buffalo actually. (Sorry, I can't tell you where it's located, that's classified.) It's printed here in hunter green and wine. And the second photo is a red maple, and it's a photo I took while I was out riding my bike in Bethlehem, NH. Something about the color of these leaves struck me so intensely I had to turn my bike around to go back for a look at them. I printed them in kelly green and florescent orange.

I'm really happy with how both of these came out. It's incredible the texture and depth of color you can achieve with just two inks. (I wish I had access to a risograph all the time, I can't imagine all the stuff I would make. Tragic.)

Another print I was also working on, over the course of several days, was this title page for pine. The bottom layer is a dithered photo of pine bark, printed in riso mahogany, and then above that, pine needles from the scan bed, printed in hunted green. (You can see the paper clips I used to attach them to the paper, I actually really love how that came out in the scans, haha.) And then a letterpress layer on top, looking pretty slick in metallic copper. I encountered a lot of pine in New Hampshire, and it was one of the trees I was intending to work with while I was there. But, I don't know. I wasn't able to really connect with it. I'm not sure why, but I suppose if the time wasn't right, there's no need to question that. I was still able to make a nice title page that will be waiting for me when I need it now.

Around this time, it was getting nearer to the end of the week, and I realized that I still had time to make some more prints, but I wasn't sure what else to make. The downside of coming without any specific ideas is that even if you're in a beautiful and inspiring place, you can't force yourself to have creative ideas on the spot.

So I decided to invest in the future of the project and make a few unfinished pages. My reasoning was, I had been having a lot of fun on the risograph and liking the results of mixing it with letterpress, and I had access to letterpress whenever I wanted at home, but access to riso would be harder to come by. So I made a few risograph prints that I could save and use later as backgrounds for new pages by printing letterpress over them. This one will probably end up being the title page for maple. It's a 2-color risograph (scarlet and sunflower) using a photo of one of the Japanese maples at the Japanese garden behind the Buffalo History Museum.

I also made this background using the scan bed, which was the product of a lot of experimentation. I originally wanted to use birch leaves, but I wasn't able to get any good scans of them, they were coming out too opaque and monotone. So I tried some maple leaves with some yellowing and discoloration, and sure enough, that translated into patterns that the scanner could pick up! Printed here in kelly green. (Fun fact, these are actually some of the exact same leaves as in the red maple photo from earlier; I took the branch with me after taking the photo and ended up repurposing the leaves for this.) The middle section was made with a piece of construction paper and printed in riso midnight. It didn't come out as dark as I was hoping, but I think it may have been a happy accident, as there's something I find really interesting about it. The way the kelly green leaves shine through the darker layer is really compelling. And while I wasn't originally too happy with the way you could see white behind the midnight, the first two people I showed it to both separately said it reminded them of looking up at the night sky through the leaves, and now I can see the stars too.

This next print was meant to be another background to save for later, but I liked it so much, it got upgraded to a regular page. Also because I liked the idea of having a set of three 2-color riso photographs that I could show together as a triptych, since the oak and maple photos came out so well. And this third one ended up being the jewel of that collection, I think! It's a photo of mostly birch trees that I took from my favorite spot that I found in Bretzfelder Park. (I went and sat there every single day I was in New Hampshire.)

I am so proud of this print. Again, it's only two colors—this time, hunter green and sunflower. But the other two came out pretty naturally: I decided how I wanted the colors to be and printed them and they came out more or less how I wanted/expected. But this one took a lot of tweaking to get it to look the way I wanted, like a lot of tweaking. It's a busy image, with all the trees in the background, and I really wanted to lighten it enough that the background would open up, without washing out the whole image. So I spent a lot of time playing with the brightness of the image and the opacity of the different ink colors, and I tried all sorts of different settings (and burned so many masters, between this and the scanned leaves, please don't remind me how many masters I burned). It hit a point where I think it was mostly stubbornness motivating me, but I felt like I wanted to prove something to myself about what I was capable of doing as an artist. And I did eventually get there: this print is exactly the outcome I wanted. I'm very happy.

The original idea for the photo of the birches was to print it at low opacity so that I could use it as a background with text on top of it. I still liked that idea, so I did it with this other photo of a birch trunk and roots. This page feels like nothing special to me, but it's not finished and I've been learning to trust the process. I find that I'm often unhappy with how a print is going right up until I put the last layer onto it. I like the idea that this page can just sit until the right idea presents itself to complete it. This is also a 2-color riso, kelly green and paprika, and it was printed at 30% opacity.

I feel good. I had essentially 5 full work days at Directangle, and I think this is a very respectable amount of work to have produced. More than the half dozen pages I challenged myself to do.

Besides the work I got done, I also just really enjoyed my time as a resident there! It was awesome stepping away from real life for a week to really focus on art, especially in a place as beautiful as the White Mountains. It was great getting to catch up with Josh, and to meet and make great friends with the other two residents I was sharing the studio with, Suzanne and Arthur from Baltimore. And I'm feeling really good about the future of the project. It was a really worthwhile experience and I hope to be back next summer to keep working on the Ogham of the Northeast. I love the idea of having an annual residency to keep me motivated as I work on the most long-term project that I've ever embarked on.