Dennis Hollingsworth

PruessPress Spring 2008

Andrew Hahn is the captain of the PruessPress ship in LA (Owner Joel Mesler has branched out to New York where he has a press over there and a gallery called Rental Gallery). We've been talking about doing something with the press and now that the show at Michael's is up and before I wheel into a new group of paintings, this is a perfect moment to tip the bucket and see what we can do together.

(Image above from the blogpost: Toolz)
Andrew asked if I could use my shards in a print. Immediately I thought of the pile of cardboard shards I had in the studio. I liked the idea of using the cast offs from the process of creating the fractal lines that inform most of my paintings. Andrew was thinking of the fractal lines rendered from shaped cardboard and I was thinking of the use of the cast offs, the shards that possess a reflection of information that created the lines in the paintings. I was excited about the shards and Andrew was excited about the fractal lines and how the print machine would render them.

We did both.

The general agenda was to start in the afternoon and see what we have there at PruessPress, what kind of ink is on hand, what kind of paper that we will be dealing with. All expectations were suspended.

What occurred to me was how different each and every print house is, how the character of each delivers different possibilities, how much fun it is to generate different bodies of work at each location and how specific the print editions are to the character of the person who created each establishment.

Imagine our delight when we ended the afternoon generating the beginning of an edition of ten, grouped in pairs, five different arguments in ink and paper. New projects suggested themselves along the way. This was just a beginning, maybe four or six sessions will finish the edition. The day had the ring of a well driven nail into douglas fir.