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COOP’s “Memento Mori”

Coop’s “1949 Mercury” was our largest print ever... until now. We started trying to figure out a sequel as soon as the ink on the Mercuries dried, and we’re happy to release it today: “Memento Mori.”

It’s big!

We tried a new paper when printing these: Arches 88. The paper is smooth, soft, thick, and—lacking any sizing—completely disintegrates in water. Printing an image with big solid blacks like this dry (and with as much punch as we wanted to give it) proved to be a bit of a challenge. Dry paper is likely to crack and pull under pressure, and is less receptive to ink; printing dry you walk a fine line between patchy, under-inked solids and sloppy, over-inked linework.

But a day of trial, error, and trickery later we’d ironed out the kinks and arrived at a great print. Killer blacks, razor sharp edges, a deep deboss... giving this awesome image the huge, precise presentation it deserves.

A quick trip to LA to get them signed...

...and we were ready to go. We only printed a regular edition of 25 of these, so get them while they’re hot: “Memento Mori” is available now on pressureprinting.com.

The Print:

• Printed from an original COOP image
• Arches 88 printmaking paper
• Hand-printed relief in black ink
• Hand signed by COOP

The Certificate of Authenticity:

• Custom designed, embossed, and perforated
• Signed and numbered by the artist

The Edition:

• Released May 2012
• Print size is 42” x 30”
• Edition of 25
• 5 printer proofs
• 5 artist’s proofs
• 1 bon à tirer

Jim Woodring’s “The Tree” & “The Cannister”

THE CANNISTER — Although many clues have been scattered throughout the Frank stories as to the nature of Pupshaw’s specific biology, this is the first actual glimpse of what might be called the Mother Pup. As you can see it has a tremendous capacity for the sort of transformational influence that makes Pupshaw such a powerful protector and peaceable companion for the gormless Frank. Who is her beneficiary? Time will tell.

THE TREE — If you have ever spent a sleepless night tormented by the question of how Frank perceives the world through those fathomless eyespots, you may able to fully appreciate this rare glimpse of The Unifactor as it registers on his drawing pad. Yes, it is always The Age of Eyes and Things That Look Like Eyes where Frank lives. Do you want to see more? You will.

—Jim Woodring

We just released a pair of small, affordable Jim Woodring prints: “The Tree” and “The Cannister.”

We’re pretty excited about them.

They follow closely in the footsteps of the ever-popular “Squeaker in the Woods” and there’s something just right about this combination of size, paper, printing, and imagery. Jim’s drawings have a wonderful tension between extreme graphic simplicity and gnarly Rococo detail. He somehow weaves these disparate styles into seamless coherent scenes that present you with just enough narrative to get you thinking but not nearly enough for you to figure out what in God’s name is going on.



They’re like endless little mysteries wrapped up in a crisp, tidy clarity.

As such, I can’t think of a better vessel for them than letterpressed prints. The prints’ flat blacks, tiny details, and razor-sharp lines are as crisp as crisp can be. We’ve pressed the edition into a soft, off-white cotton paper with a very deep deboss. The paper puffs right out of Frank’s cheeks; it oozes out of every little textural nook and cranny.

They’re small, they’re cheap, & they’re great. Buy ’em today.



The Prints:

• Printed from an original Jim Woodring ink drawing
• Hand-printed on Rives Heavyweight printmaking paper in in black
• Embossed printer’s chop
• Signed & numbered by Jim Woodring

The Certificates of Authenticity:

• Custom designed
• Signed and numbered by the artist

The Editions:

• Released April 2012
• Print sizes are 8” x 6 1/4”
• Editions of 50
• 5 printer proofs
• 5 artist’s proofs
• 1 bon à tirer

Travis Louie’s “Sarah & Emmett”

This print has been in the works forever. We’re so glad to finally release it!

Brad had the good luck to be one of the first people to see “Sarah and Emmett,” mere minutes after it was hung on the wall for Travis’s great “Strange Grooming Habits” solo show at Copro Nason way back in 2009. He bought it on the spot and asked Mr. Louie if we could produce a print of it—Travis most graciously agreed.

Having the real, honest-to-goodness painting in front of you when proofing intaglio plates is both a blessing and a curse… the actual painting is relatively large (19” × 16”) and tack sharp, with a subtle, wonderful tonality between its cool whites and rich sepia blacks. The details are so crisp (the hair! the fur! the fisheye!) and the surface so smooth that it looks untouched by human hands. I imagine that Travis lit a few candles, donned a magical frock coat and top hat, closed his eyes and rubbed his temples as the acrylic paint magically developed daguerreotype-style onto the gessoed board across the room.

If you haven’t seen Travis’s work in person I highly recommend it.

But yes… sometimes having the painting can be a curse. There turned out to be a great deal more information in its 19” × 16” than we could cram into an 8” × 5.5” print. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t try; the plates were made and remade and re-remade until we stopped finding things to improve, inks were remixed, the press recalibrated, paper moisture fiddled with, wiping techniques tweaked… the end result is the finest intaglio printing we’re capable of.



And of course we weren’t done.

First came the antiquing and hand staining... the handmade Twinrocker paper took a touch of sepia wash and a bit of walnut ink around the edges like a champ.




Part of the magic of the original lies in the sheen of its smooth surface. We are also familiar with how good Travis’s work looks under domed glass. So we wanted to see if we could work a touch of that shine and dimension into the paper surface itself via embossing. A thousand-dollar domed brass plate and a trip through the Kluge press later, and we had our answer: yes.




Difficult to photograph but impossible not to see and feel, the silky polish of the printed area rising from richly textured paper in a shallow dome and the decorative deboss surrounding the image make for a wonderfully tactile print.



Finally, no project with Travis would be complete without his exquisite hand lettering. Travis hand-titled each and every print in graphite and his signature is a little piece of art all to itself.




Overall we couldn’t be happier with how this project came together. Worth the wait is an understatement. Buy it now on pressureprinting.com!


The Edition

• Released February 2012
• Limited edition of 50 prints
• 10 printer’s proofs
• 10 artist’s proofs
• 1 bon à tirer

The Print

• Printed from an original, exclusive Travis Louie image
• Paper size is 13” × 9.5”
• Image size is 8” × 5.5”
• Intaglio printed onto custom Twinrocker paper in sepia ink
• Each print individually stained with gouache and walnut ink
• Embossed dome over image area
• Debossed decorative pattern surrounding image
• Title hand-lettered by Travis
• Embossed printer’s chop
• Signed and numbered by the artist
• Comes with a signed and numbered certificate of authenticity

Amphibian Frontier

We’ve loved Todd’s work forever and had the pleasure of designing his big monograph, “American Surreal” a couple of years ago; so it’s with great pleasure that we’re able to release our second project with him featuring the image that graced the cover of that book: “Amphibian Frontier.”

Todd writes in “American Surreal” that the image was born out of a free-associated mix of memories and artifacts from his 1950’s childhood: frog hunting, toy indians and a plastic Zorro, N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations in The Last of The Mohicans, and the traumatic experience of falling into a yellowjacket hive. Stirred together and shot through with yellow, the result is one of Todd’s most arresting images, released here for the first and only time.

We printed the edition using offset lithography to enable the scale and color that the image demands, and it came out beautifully. Todd works across scales so well, creating huge dynamic compositions that pop and grab you from afar which are rendered down to the atom and have a million little details to discover up close. So the only way to print this image was huge; the poster is three and a quarter feet tall. It’s on a satisfyingly heavy paper and we’ve added some blind embossed embellishments—a title, printer’s chops—as final touches.


All told it’s a stunning print. Buy it now on pressureprinting.com!

The Print:

• Printed from an original Todd Schorr image
• Offset lithography on premium cover weight paper
• Hand signed by Todd Schorr

The Certificate of Authenticity:

• Custom designed, embossed and perforated
• Signed and numbered by the artist

The Edition

• Released May, 2011
• Print size is 39" x 25"
• Image size is 20.25" x 33.75"
• Edition of 100
• 20 artist’s proofs

Lucky Summer Sale!

It’s awfully hot (97° in Denver yesterday, to be exact), so it must be time for a summer sale! To celebrate the season and welcome the flood of new folks who are discovering us this week via a bit of wonderfully kind publicity, we’re discounting everything in the pressureprinting.com store by 25%. Sale ends Friday the 13th. Enjoy!

Grandma Knew...

Grandma knew that if you were patient, good times would always curdle up. She was the oldest in a fluctuating family of 17 siblings, and had seen life at its harshest, and known it to be like chewing on rancid beef jerky. She was of a generation for whom pleasures like bathing without clothing would never occur, for some omnipotently randy deity always had his eyes on you, and that would be too much for the fabric of life to bear. As grandma would say, “I was born a Cyclops, and I’m gonna die a Cyclops, pass the coon gravy to yer lil’ sister.”. Having never seen things in 3-D before, she felt no need to let doctors “dig around in my skull”, looking for her other eye. “Those charlatans steal enough of what durn piddly little ya got.”, as it was already, so she said, and “I got better things ta do with my vittles than to expose them to one of them varmints.”, was her philosophy in life. Grandma met grandpa when she was not even yet a teenager, and had an eye on him from before she was old enough to go to the store. Grandma felt like, “we gots two eyes when we is together, you can’t call us four eyes!” They took to each other early on, any thing he would shoot, she could gut it, and cook it, and put it on the table for whoever was there to eat up. When she turned 13, and he turned 15, they decided it was high time to tie the knot, and they had a brood of their own in no time. Many of the neighbors marveled at the sight of Grandpa and Grandma coming into town, their 11 cyclop children in tow, all wearing matching gingham skateboard clothing, all wearing matching earbuds attached to grandpa’s MP3 player, listening to the same remixes of Appalachian death metal clog dancing reindeer music. Grandma played a little hammer dulcimer when they were at home sitting around the microwave stove-kettle heating unit in the middle of their one room log cabin, way up in the mountains. The kids would take turns doing a slow, yet complicated little dance grandpa had brought over from the old country, and they sounded like a giant alien beehive as they all joined in on their wax paper and combs, humming in time, while the cruel winter winds blasted outside the safety of their small, yet odorific mountain top cabin. Late at night, the children would huddle in fear at the warbling sounds that would fill the room, as the sputtering stove-kettle heating unit would cast a shadow of grandpa and grandma making the beast with one back on the far wall of the cabin. In those days, life was quite harsh, and people jumped in age from 17, directly to 75, thereby skipping 57 years that they might have endured had they been living in a different corner of the planet. Grandma always said, “that’s alright by me, if ida been living all them years, it would surely have kilt me sooner than this!”, and would make a big hocker sound, right before spitting a sour chaw of tobaccy and killing the unsuspecting chicken scratching on the log cabin floor. She was a strange critter, I think we musta had funerals and buried her on at least three separate occasions, but true to her tenacious self, the Christmas tears and sorrow holiday would arrive, and there she would be, up before dawn whistling, and rendering fat from a recently dismembered animal into the shape of the Christmas piñata ghost, filled with gooseberries and pine cones, and other treats that would make her Christmas eve meal the spread of the year. You couldn’t eat or shit for at least five weeks after that feast. When one of the children would announce intentions to get hitched, she would slap their ears, and hit them on top of the head with a frying pan, before rapping her hairy arms around them, sobbing and laughing simultaneously, smothering them with big slobbery kisses.

—Mark Mothersbaugh

Grandma Cyclops

We had the pleasure of releasing our first collaboration with the esteemed Mark Mothersbaugh, “Grandpa Cyclops,” all the way back in November of 2007. Ever since, we’ve been pestering Mark to come up with a grandma. She’s finally arrived.


Grandma is clearly of the same stock as her monocular companion—she’s got the same wispy hair, geographic skin, overlarge ears, and of course there’s the bit about only having one eye.


So in constructing this edition (and after excavating our three year old production notes from the bottom of a drawer) we set about trying to match everything about Grandpa. From the just-ever-so-slightly-sepia-ish ink to the grain and texture of the printing.


A few rounds of test plates, a few days of printing and a few more of drying and flattening, we were set to begin the staining process. The duo-tone stain we apply brings a warmth and an antiqued quality to the piece that’s truly lovely, but the process—dipping fresh, pristine, slaved-over prints into a pot of brown inky water—is also slightly terrifying.


Meanwhile, we toiled away at the resin frames. It was only fitting that we encase Grandma in the same intricate frame that Grandpa enjoys, so we broke out the old molds and set to pouring.



The sanding and antiquing processes are above all dusty, and need be done outside. So I don’t know why we always seem to be doing these resin frame projects during the winter.



And while we were braving the Denver winter to finish the frames, the prints took a round trip to sunny LA to be signed by the man himself.



And with that, all that was left was to put the various pieces—the prints, the frames, the powder-coated steel backs, and the jewel-like convex glass—together into the finished product we’re releasing today.



Enjoy!

The Print:

• Printed from an original Mark Mothersbaugh image
• Rives Heavyweight printmaking paper
• Hand-printed intaglio in black ink
• Each print individually stained in gouache and ink
• Hand signed by Mark Mothersbaugh

The Frame:

• Hand-cast and antiqued resin frame
• High quality curved glass
• Custom laser cut solid steel back for free-standing or wall-mounted display

The Certificate of Authenticity:

• Custom designed, embossed and perforated
• Signed and numbered by the artist

The Edition

• Released April, 2010
• Frame size is 10.5” x 7.25”
• Print size is 4.75” x 3.375”
• Edition of 50
• 10 printer’s proofs
• 10 artist’s proofs
• 1 Bon à tirer