Brandon Graving is a female experimental printmaker. Her large-scale monoprints have a sculptural quality; “their embossed surfaces and different viscosities of inks have a presence unlike other prints.” The viewer can decipher the layers and see the history of the decisions that make up the work. It is an immersive looking experience into Graving’s creative expression.
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Resources for this episode: www.beyondthepaint.net
Links to Graving’s work and printmaking studio
www.brandongraving.com and @gravitypress on IG
Facebook: Brandongraving
Image Credit: “Dance on a Blue Stage” monoprint
Script:
Brandon Graving is an experimental printmaker. Her specialty is large-scale monoprints. Before we dive into Graving’s work, her practice and experimental contributions in printmaking which we will explore in my conversation with Graving, allow me to share a short history of printmaking and a couple of notable female voices in printmaking. The art of printmaking has a lengthy history. The first instance of woodblock printing came from China in 868 when creating the Diamond Sutra book. In 1423, printmaking made its way to Europe. By printing with woodblocks, books were produced for the first time. Johannes Gutenberg invented the first printing press with movable type in the 1440s-50s. While it wasn’t the first book ever printed, he would infamously print the Gutenberg Bible.
Different printmaking techniques evolved from there. By 1477 Flemish artists produced the first intaglio printing, and by the 1660s, the Germans invented the mezzotint process. The creation of the aquatint method and lithographs would come in the late 1700s through the mid-1800s. In the early 20th century, screenprinting was invented and popularized by Pop artists like Andy Warhol, Peter Blake, and Robert Rauschenberg.
An early female printmaker is Diana Scultori from Italy, an engraver from the mid-16th century, who engraved some 62 prints, mainly of religious and mythological subjects. An engraving is a printmaking technique that involves incisions into a metal plate which retain the ink and form the printed image. Part of the reason we know about Scultori’s work at all is that she signed her prints, works like “The Virgin Mary and Child accompanied by many angels and seated on a bank of clouds” the central figures are Mary, a halo radiates brightly in long thin streams of light around her head, and her baby son Jesus clutching at his mother’s waist, anchored below billowing clouds are cherub shaped angels and in the far distance we see a landscape of mountains and trees, the details are exquisite. The imagery in Scultori’s printmaking is representational—iconic figures, objects in nature, heavenly angels they are part of the Christian narrative. The engraved image is reproduced over and over—the process does not allow delinations or changes in the image.
Before the invention of printing, artists who wanted to have multiple copies of their work needed to copy it over by hand, one reproduction at a time. Printing allowed the same designs to be more easily reproduced and distributed to many people. In the world of art, however, printmaking is much more than a way of copying an original. There are many different techniques and each one gives a unique character to every work it creates—artists often choose a particular technique, engraving, etching, intaglio, relief are some examples, because they think it will suit the kind of effect they want to achieve.
A powerful female printmaker known for her depictions of the Black American experience, culture and women in the 20th century is Elizabeth Catlett. “Sharecropper” from 1952 “calls attention to the tribulations of tenant farming—a system in which rent for the land is paid by the farmer with part of the crop, creating an impossible-to-escape cycle of debt. What we see is the dignity of a black female figure, a heroic portrait of an anonymous woman. We look from an upward angle into her noble face beneath the wide brim of her straw hat. Catlett said that purpose of her work was “to present black people in their beauty and dignity for ourselves and others to understand and enjoy.” The image was printed from the cut linoleum block—earlier printings were black and white. Catlett added color in later printings.
Some artists like this show’s celebrated printmaker Brandon Graving, create only one print—this is called a monoprint. Monoprints are print techniques that enable an artist to produce an image that is one of a kind. A monotype image prints from a polished plate, perhaps glass or metal. The artist puts no permanent marks on it. She makes an image on it in ink or another medium, then wipes away the ink in places where the artist wants the paper to show through. The image is then printed. Only one impression is possible. Monoprints can be made using any print process. (intaglio, lithography) Inking the image area can include a ring colors, changes in the spread of the ink across the image area, adding other features by hand. Artists choose to make monoprints to explore themes and variations.
Graving’s large-scale monoprints have a sculptural quality. She says, “I think of a piece of paper sculpturally, so the monoprints with their embossed surfaces and different viscosities of inks have a presence unlike other prints,” “The three-dimensionality of the print is actual,” she writes. “The various plates and objects leave behind an impression embossed in the paper, and the press forces the different viscosity of inks through the paper, from hugging deep into the fibers to resting on the surface. The viewer, rewarded for coming in close, can decipher the layers and see the history of the decisions that make up the work.” You can see the hand of the artist very intimately.
She also constructs multi-media sculptures that capture the transience and translucence we often associate with paper mediums. “When I show the work together, monoprints and sculptures, they inform each other in unexpected ways.” And as she adds in her artist’s statement: “All of these works attempt to describe an aspect of humanness, with great attention to the natural world.”
I recently attended the opening of Graving’s show at the Real Eyes Gallery in North Adams, Ma in mid-October. Her series of brightly colored monoprints juxtaposed to pairings of ethereal sculptures entitled “Dance on a Blue Stage: I Love You—Tell Everyone,” became an interactive, multi-faceted and engaging looking experience. The materials that form the sculptures hold compelling narratives—pale, mute colored sculptures cast from myrtle trees felled during Hurricane Katrina—atop hand-painted vellum are “found shells, glass beads, egret and rooster feathers, porcupine quills collected in Africa.” Graving enthusiastically led me through visual journey through the accompaniment of the large-scale monoprints, They are saturated in color, vivid blue, red, embossed gold flows like a stream and then puddles in unexpected areas of the print. The experience is mesmerizing. A Complete immersion-as I noted, you can see the layers of decisions, the true fingerprint of Graving’s hand through her prints. She creates a connectedness that inspires close investigation, very intimate, and yet when you stand back and take in the work as a whole, there is this sense of awe, a quality of sublimity that washes over your senses and yet the work is also rooted—grounds in nature?????.
Generally on my show I dive into individual works before I speak with the artist—today, join me in a conversation with Brandon—let’s together journey with her through the beauty and depth of her monoprints.