Briar Craig is the associate professor of printmaking at the
University of British Columbia Okanagan. He focuses primarily on screen
printing, and has a love for typography and text that he incorporates into his
work.
Recently we got together to talk about print making, art books, and topography:
JB: You have said before that print making is making a number of originals instead of copies, can you tell me about that?
BC: It’s a difficult distinction to make when you are talking about text because of course once you’ve got lead typeset you can print forever and it’s really not going to wear out very easily, so you can print unlimited things where as print making does tend to be about the limited edition in a way. From my perspective anyway. Certainly I have the capability. The technology we use in screen printing for example, is capable of printing thousands of things, but why would you do that? I think there is a kind of fascination with printing technology in terms of printing text. I mean there is a fascination about printing whatever number you need and, because you tend to be printing one thing at a time, it’s not filled with different colours and things like that. It might be, but it doesn’t tend to be. Once you get the type set, or the litho plate exposed, or whatever you can just print until you get the number you want. Whereas with layering prints, to make images you start with a certain number of pieces of paper and you print all the black or all the yellow or all the red or all the blue and then once those are done and dry then you print the next colour and if you screw up that one’s gone. It’s just out. So, if you start with 10 sheets of paper you might end up with only three prints that turn out and the other seven might have failed for one reason or another. So, the process itself of building images does tend to foster a limited edition kind of mentality because there is no way you could start with a thousand sheets of paper. Not only would it be expensive, where would you put them as they were drying? Whereas with letter press stuff, it tends to come off the press almost dry, so you can stack things if you need to. I mean, it’s not the ideal thing to do but it can be done.
JB: That said about print making, how do you feel about art books? Because there is this whole movement towards the book as art, or art books, do you think of them as originals or do you think of them as copies?
BC: Well, again, I think that it’s multiple originals. I mean, even when we talk about multiple originals in print making there is idiosyncratic differences between them all. There is also a thing called the “edition varie” [edition Ver-y-Ah] where you can have a hundred images that have the same component parts, but they are all put together maybe slightly differently, or the colours change, or there’s a shift in some way. I tend to think of the book as that. If you print a limited edition of 10 books, or 400 books they’re all going to be slightly different but they really contain all the same information. So, I see them as the same.
JB: Would you number the books as one print run even if the colours were different and that sort of thing?
BC: You could, yes. Some limited edition books are editioned. I mean chapbooks, and things like that. They aren’t printing massive numbers. I don’t know if they are editioning them, but I still see them as the same as a print. I think a lot of the same interests are shared between publishers, people who are making limited edition books, and print makers. We are interested in the feel of it. We’re interested in the look of it. We’re interested in how inks sits on paper and all those things are aesthetic concerns that I think the artist and the book designer all share. We all share paper and we all share ink, and pressure to some extent. Those things have very visible manifestations and I think those are the things being honoured now more than they were maybe 20 or 30 years ago.
JB: Yes. It’s like you were saying earlier about the difference between the desire to imprint or not imprint the paper with the printing press changing over time and as we have moved to the digital, the desire for that indentation that comes from using lead type has become popular because it equates to authenticity. I’m just trying to collect my thoughts here, I haven’t done much in the way of interviewing before and I am fairly non-linear thinker.
BC: That’s a good thing. Because I am so linear as I am sure you can tell and I think you have to be when you are dealing with a process oriented thing but I think that print making is about understanding the process and feeling the process rather than memorizing a recipe. It’s not like once you do this, then you do that, then you do that, once you get it you just do those things and you don’t really think about it in a linear way. It just makes sense.
JB: Kind of like how you might use a poetic form and within that form you can just go with it and do whatever you want, but there is still a method?
BC: Yeah and you can throw out the rules and say ‘well I’m going to try this different way’ or ‘I’m going to reverse these two steps and see what happens’. As long as you understand what those steps do you can go back and fix things if you have to and sometimes I think that it is really just fun to play with the materials and see what kind of accidents happen. As an artist making images I do tend, I am sure you have heard me talk before about this before; I have said this before; I am in collaboration with the process. I am not sure that painters, drawers, sculptors feel as in collaboration with their process. Lithography in particular can do awful things to images, it can also totally change your intentions, but if you are open to seeing what happens through that it might better than expected, and it also gives you something new to work with, something unexpected to work with. That’s what keeps it interesting.
JB: Would you consider it more avant-garde than other art forms? Like moving towards enjoying the process more than your desire for the finished product?
BC: It’s funny. I think one of the slams against print is that it is so technical and you have to know beforehand what it’s going to turn out like and I don’t believe that to be true. I think that if you think you have got an idea in your head and you’re going to make it then yeah it is going to be a technical struggle to make the process do exactly what you want but and in some ways it is kind of a weird thing in school because we have to teach people from that perspective at first, you have to take control of this. But once you have control of it once you understand it, it’s not bad to sort of screw with it a little bit and see what happens because then every stage of the development of an image is something that you are having to figure out and that keeps the creativity alive. A painter might say every brush stroke has to be creative. Well, yeah we have to be creative too but we also have to think in layers so we have to be creative every time we’re making an image for every layer. So, I don’t see the process as somehow imposing something on us. It is a collaborator and it is something that likes to mess with us sometimes and sometimes it does exactly what you want and you’re thrilled. Then other times it’s like whoa what the hell happened there? But, hey, that’s kind of cool. Or oh my God, I have to start again.
JB: I just relate it all back to poetry so often because that is what I do, and I think that it’s totally like that. I mean thinking of the poem as being a separate entity or like having its own kind of personhood and you just kind of explore that.
BC: Yeah. I can’t imagine knowing what exactly what something is going to be and then taking the two weeks to a month to make it be exactly that. How boring would that be! My work is really controlled in a lot of ways, I do have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to turn out but I’m really more interested in the nuances of the things that don’t go the way that I expect and the scrambling you have to do to make that still work, because once you have invest 4 weeks in an edition of 10 prints and something doesn’t go exactly the way you expected you have to figure out how to make that work so that you can still live with it.
JB: It’s definitely not like at that point you can scrap the whole thing. As a lover of type and typography do you ever see yourself incorporating pressing (with or instead of screen printing) into your work?
BC: It’s more of a scale issue right now. Screen printing allows me to print very larger in a very small studio like we have, whereas letterpress is really made for things like small posters. They’re not really made for gigantic things, and that’s where my interest tends to lie. In larger scale. I think it’s maybe because I am large too. In the end when I stand back and look at a print that is really large, I stand back and I think ‘oh, wow, yeah, that’s really nice’ and when I hold up some little thing, and I go ‘oh look what I did’, I feel like an idiot. But having said that too when I was in Regina over this sabbatical, they were just donated this past year, a fair number of wood type and metal type at a very large size and so I was printing off entire alphabets just to have a visual record of the imperfections in the alphabet. I printed a light version of each and I printed a dark version of each and a kind of a scrappy in between version. Now, I am able to scan those and I will be able to use those to make whatever size text that I need for screen prints, so that I will have the visual qualities of the letter press, but it will be printed through screen. I won’t get the embossing sadly.
JB: I know people can build their own font. Would you ever consider building like giant font sets?
BC: We’ve got this laser cutter now, and it engraves things, so if we can get some wood, good enough quality wood we could engrave wood type. Storage is always the issue, but yeah I am totally keen on that.
JB: That’s so awesome.
BC: Yeah, when I was at Don Black Linecasting (http://www.donblack.ca/) in Toronto a couple of years ago, he, or they, were so excited by this company in the states that was cutting wood type again and they were doing it with a digital router, but now the laser cutter seems like it’s way easier to get absolutely precise edges and things.
JB: Then you can do whatever kind of font you want, as well.
BC: Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be on a perfect piece of wood as well. As an artist I am more interested in the imperfections of a surface whereas buying new font they are more interested in having no imperfections on the surface because they will get dinged up over time. I would just get crappy wood so whatever you have on the surface of that crappy wood is what you end up printing and that’s kind of cool too.
JB: So, my next question then is, what’s your favourite font? I know we talked Helvetica at one point.
BC: Well, I’m in awe of Helvetica just for its clarity. I know that, what is it? Arial, is the windows versions of Helvetica but it’s not as nice. There’s something about it that just seems a little wrong. I’m not even sure I can really say what. So, I am in awe of Helvetica and for certain things like labelling, shipping labels and things like that Helvetica is the best because it is so easy to read. I have to say boring as it sounds Times New Roman. But Garamond is my all-time favourite because it really feels old.
JB: What is that you like about Garamond as a font that you relate to verses Helvetica which is great for shipping and packing and clarity?
BC: There is something about a kind of nostalgia to it. It feels old, it’s much more cursive. It’s a serifed font and the little loops and bends on the bottoms of the letters have a really nice almost scriptive feel to them. So, for me it’s clarity with the flair of the handmade somehow.
JB: How do you feel about people that might say that Helvetica is like the serial killer of fonts?
BC: (Laughs) Well, I think the criticisms we level are reflections of our inner selves. I have never heard anything about that! Then again, I do remember seeing a couple of years ago there was a documentary about Helvetica out and it was on PBS and it was two hours of just font, Helvetica in it’s different forms and I remember I had never realized that there were so many different forms!
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