I started out working with Bill Weege in a place called the Jones Road Print Shop & Stable. He’s a teacher and a pretty well-known printmaker in his own right for a lot of protest posters and stuff like that. In fact, he did workshops at the Venice Biennale four years ago. I didn’t have a lot of information about print­making when I started. Actually, a guy named Rory O’Neil commissioned the first print Bill and I did, Sun, Moon, Title Page. He introduced me to Bill and I went out to Wisconsin, and Bill taught me all this stuff, and I taught him some things I wanted to do and he liked them, so we got along pretty well. And we developed techniques for doing things through our own sort of industriousness. We’re industrious artists, we’re industrious people. We have similar farm backgrounds. We have mechanical skills we take for granted, almost, because there’s never a doubt that one or the other of us can do almost anything that comes up because we’ve got those kinds of skills. To put things together. When he’s working with me, anyway, he drops his ego. We more or less both do. I mean, I’m making visual determinations, but the two of us are working together like a team of workers to put things together. I do as much labor on these things as he does. We don’t divide the labor really, but he knows a lot more about printmaking techniques, and he does the printing.

You don’t adhere to the standard techniques?

I don’t even know them. I don’t even care.

Did you go through the whole art school thing?

No, not really. I had art education in Kansas at a liberal arts college, Kansas State University. Just a state college, didn’t have much of anything, and I didn’t get a degree. I’ve gone out to Wisconsin so many times now it’s beginning to meld together, but I don’t think it really matters, because as a whole experience, we’ve had a good time there.

What kind of paper did you use in Sun, Moon, Title Page?

A Strathmore paper . . . or something. I originally purchased 100 sheets of paper, and I cut it into a square, two smaller squares, and a rectangle. The big square is the basic square of Sun, Moon, Title Page. The two smaller squares were worked on separately and either sewn or woven into the basic square. The remaining rectangle was further subdivided into ten stacks of ten sheets each. Only ten sheets at a time could go through my sewing machine. I did a different sewing machine drawing on each stack at home, in Shelter Island, before I went back to Wisconsin. It was one of the ways I got psyched up to go there. I used them to make Tails of Brave Ulysses, a very unorthodox, very limited-edition book. I made another called The Incestuous Kids. All my work’s incestuous. I’m a nut about keeping things and going back to use them. I won’t throw anything away. All my grids, like Punk (1974) and Black Bart (1974), are pieces from earlier prints. I would get saturated with them, cut them up, save each package, and put them together again.

How?

We’d make a jig out of little pieces of paper and pins and number the strips. The strips are always cut together. You cut them on a mechanical cutter. If the prints are all registered right, and the paper is lined up right, each strip will be the same.

What about aligning?

Aligning is done with little blocks that are put into the jig.

I see, like a die.

Yeah, like a die. The most I’ve ever done in one edition of these was 25. I think there are 12 of Black Bart. Some of that’s potato print.

Any other vegetables?

Parsnips, carrots, and potatoes on that one. We did a little of each to see if there was any different texture. There wasn’t much. And this is flocking. I’ve used that a lot.

What is the circular area in Black Bart? Is it embossed?

That’s embossed from a photo-engraved plate. I took a photograph of my beads, of these strands coiled like you coil a rope on a sailboat. It was on a brand-new gray concrete floor I’d just poured myself. And I photographed it from the bridge of the studio, looking down. The coil of beads covered about eight feet across. Bill tried to color-separate the photograph and reprint it. It never did register properly, so it went different ways. You see more of it in a circular print I did. It’s called Alan Shields’ Shield (1974) and another’s the Spear (1974). It’s poetic, to say the least, very poetic. I removed the center of Shield to make Spear. International Teddy Bear (1972) is a related series of prints, too, based on color variations. There are four sets and 12 prints in a set. There’s a red, green, blue, and a yellow, but the paper’s been dyed. The color variations go 12 different ways. The dots change on each of the four. The differences are in some ways gigantic, and some ways very small.

What kinds of dyes do you use? Aniline dyes?

No, I use cloth dyes. I use Rit a lot. I use some others . . . I never know what I’m using. I bought some Cushing dyes in California that are supposedly what they use for yarn and knit goods. I vat dye, and I boil the paper so the dye’s in there pretty good. I’m interested in doing some prints that are on glass with ceramic inks so they can be baked and hung outside. I want to hang my graphic work outside. Out in the trees. It’s possible. I did one on glass called Chicken Shit (1974). And I did eight etchings in 1974, each on a piece of paper made specifically for the edition. There are eight different combinations of a circle, square, and triangle laminated in the paper. I used four plates, and I kept changing the plates around. There’s glitter in the paper too.

Put in when the paper was made?

Yeah. I use a lot of thread in my paper, too.

You make your own paper? Do you grind it up? A paper beater is expensive.

Joe Wilfer bought one. They’re really great, those grinders, though they’re noisy sons of bitches. We’re making over a barn into a paper mill outside Oregon.

When did you start making your paper?

I learned about it in Wisconsin a couple of years ago. We started doing it then, and I’ve gradually gotten more involved. Last year I went out three times just to make paper.

Who sponsors your going out there?

I’m a powerful man. I do that. We make it work, because I trade Bill one third of an edition, and he produces it. He has to feed me while I’m there, and I make it work for me and for him too, because he can sell enough to make his money back. Then we both try to sit on our works and make our buck. I do it without having to go through another agent. If I did, I’d have to pre-evaluate my system, which I don’t want to do. I’m a bastard about that too. I won’t even predict what it’s going to be. If I take a commission, it’s got to be from the most open-ended people imaginable. I’m getting things ready for Wisconsin now. I love to go out there.

When I go out this time, I’m going to take this stuff to make paper. It’s plastic matting made to put on shelves if you have jelly jars. I’ve also seen it in bars. I press these forms into the wet sheets of paper or make the paper right on top of it.

In other words, you don’t alter its structure; this is how it came.

That’s how it came.

Tell me more about your plans for the paper.

I keep a lot of my stuff out in Wisconsin, but here’s some paper we made that’s been pressed with a 20-ton jack, 50,000 pounds of pressure to squeeze out the water. Some is multilaminated. This has got some rickrack in it. I put those threads in the paper—it’s mixed right in. The lamination is so flat and complete it really becomes one. I’m always working with things that have already had something happen to them to make things that I do later respond differently. I can overlay and overlay for a long time. A lot of times I have to make real arbitrary decisions, and I have to work for a month or two to really achieve the density I need. I work damn hard, and I work the hell out of that guy Weege. His back gets worse and worse every time I go there. Actually, he’s a wonderful guy . . .

The two of you have a working relationship?

We have a real relationship. He enjoys it too, because he’s an artist. There is no question about Bill’s artistic capacities. He is so curious and so inventive himself, and he and I can talk so easily, because we have somewhat similar educations. He was born on a farm, he had a farmer father, second-generation immigrant too. I’ve used some laminated paper already in the etchings I did the last time I was out there. Some of this is sophisticated in a materials way. Joe Wilfer at the Upper US Paper Mill always has copper wire and brass wire and so on. Everything is there. It’s very old world in a sense. Joe and I have some complications so far; he’s kind of slow and my tempo is kind of faster, and so we’ve only been able to work for one or two days at a time. And I like to go crazy, go fast, and so I guess I become impatient with him. He moved to a barn out in the country, and I think it’s going to be just great, really great. I’m going to try it. I said I wouldn’t, but I am. But what I started to say, what I’m going to work on this time is sort of a watermark thing—a watermark drawing locked into the paper. You really see it when you hold the print up to light.

You said you’d do some prints to hang outside.

That’s another thing; that’s really another thing, though, you know, that involves light too. Chicken Shit is in the house. It has to be hung inside, because it’s made with regular screenprint ink. . . . We’re going to get some special inks that can be fired, so that we can glaze glass. Bill said you can find them in Chicago. I want to make some prints on glass that we can hang outside. Where were we now?

You were going to tell me how flocking’s made and how you use it.

It’s nylon fibers. Nylon can be tinted and colored. They color it and then it’s cut. It must be sliced from a single strand of many layers of fibers so that when you dust it down on the glue, static electricity separates it and it stacks up. It’s like hair. And it dyes neat. It’s dipped into a vat of dye that’s boiling.

The flocking absorbs the color . . .

If there is glue and flocking on top of the paper when it’s dipped, it absorbs the dye differently and achieves a different surface. You can see three, four different surfaces just on this strip, because of the different things that have been previously there. This is what I was talking about before, about my work. It’s incestuous. It’s constantly setting down one on top of the other. I’ve got a lot of different things that I lay down, so that once it gets going, it gains a momentum all its own. It’s real explosive when it goes real fast. When I did my grid Dorothy Jean (1973), I took a piece of paper, and I wrote out the colors I wanted and where I wanted them printed. I just drew it. I had made a silkscreen of triangles that were all in a line on their bases. They looked like teeth. And I said, “All right, Bill, interlock this with all of these colors in this order. Print every color you can.” Bill and his son Fred printed while I went home to visit my folks for five or six days . . . when I came back, it was all there. I hadn’t touched it; I hadn’t thought about it, beyond that one time when I wrote the note. Another time I phoned Bill and told him to make a screening a certain way, and that I would be there by the time it was finished. He said, “I’ll race ya.” And, of course, he had it done a long time before I got there. I did some more on the screen they’d done as a base, and we went right to work.

So often the contact artists have with the printer is so remote . . .

Some printers are remote. I have—I won’t talk about it; this is being taped.

Is Weege still doing his own stuff?

Sure, although a lot of things have affected him. He would perhaps choose, of all the various people he sees, different ones to work with. Although he’s a devilish guy. He doesn’t care what I do there, I break his ass a lot of times, I print all day long. Other people don’t work nearly so hard. A lot of my things are done in such a way that the only way I can get away with it is that I do it myself. We do so much handwork on these things and so much accidental work. I suppose there are schools of thought about that. I change the colors a lot of times on a print part way through. All of it is graphic work, and its value is in somebody’s eyes and not in numbers anyway. I make real short editions sometimes. Not out of any kind of preciousness, but just because it’s . . . because of other logic.

Are there any artists you particularly admire?

Well, I admire H. C. Westermann. He walks on his hands; he’s an acrobat. I can’t walk on my hands, but there are other people . . .

I know it can be a hostile question.

No. My influences are probably so complicated that I don’t think it’s any single individual. I think it has a lot to do with the feeling that a whole lot of artists made me feel—a lot of people are great. The best point in my life was when I realized I could put those things in my pocket and play with whatever they all were or whatever I was and forget. You wouldn’t know to be an artist unless you had made a study of the academic existence that preceded yourself. No one would have that definition by themselves, but once you get into that, you’re involved in being an artist. You really must come to Wisconsin.

Making paper’s simple. Paper is simply matted cellulose fibers. The beater is a machine which beats rags with water into a fibrous state or pulp. It’s like boiling rice. You boil the rice and its fibers swell, take on water, and secrete a starch. Well, that’s what these cellulose fibers do with beating. Water is beaten into them, and they give off a mucilage. That acts as the bonding agent that holds the sheet of paper together. So, all you need really is water and cotton rags. No other things added. A mold is used to trap the fibers and form the sheet. It’s made up of two parts: the screen, which is just a wooden frame with a sieve-like surface that the fibers settle on and the water drains through, and the deckle frame, which is a dike or wall that holds the fibers on the screen and determines the shape of the sheet.

Where do you get molds?

These are from England. They’re made by Ames and Co., I think, in Maidstone. Molds are used in pairs. That’s because papermakers usually work in teams of three. And they have one man called the vat man who does the forming, and he pushes the mold with a freshly formed sheet over it to a coucher, who transfers it onto a blanket. He throws a second mold back to the vat man, who keeps putting on the deckle frame, forming the sheets, and so on. The third man helps. I can give you a quick background of the recent history of American papermaking. Of course, Dard Hunter is the grandfather of it all, but there was a guy named Douglas Howell who, I think, made paper once for Michael Ponce de Leon, thick sheets. Okay. Well, he was making paper somewhere in New York, and he still is. He went and trained a guy by the name of John Koller, who works out of Woodstock Valley, Connecticut. Howell also trained Lawrence Barker who established a paper mill at Cranbrook Academy. Aris Koutroulis, Walter Hamady, and Roland Poska were all students there and got into paper. Koutroulis set up a mill at Wayne State in Detroit. Poska set up mills at Layton School of Art in Milwaukee and at Rockford College in Illinois, and Hamady set up a mill at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I got interested in it through Hamady, and the Clarks at Twinrocker in Indiana learned from Aris Koutroulis at Wayne State. They were students there.

Sounds like incestuous kids. . . . Are you an artist yourself?

Yes. I studied printing, that’s how I got into paper. I’ve always been fascinated with technique. This really turned me on. A whole lot of things started to happen at the same time. Bill started this shop, and we did some things with paper. I’ve been at this for about five years now, and it just seemed like the thing to do. I don’t have an ego in the sense that an artist needs one, but I really enjoy the fact I can collaborate with these people. Sometimes I get some good ideas and I think they are as good as anyone else’s—or better.

Paper’s very intimate, because you can control it. We work to where the molds and templates are stable, and then even though there may be a flaw, it may be a consistent flaw.

It’s a happy accident.

Yeah. I don’t say everything’s got to be perfect step by step. It makes for less neurotic problems somehow. I’m just interested in my response to paper.

Alan is a storehouse of new ideas, just incredible. I just didn’t know what the hell he was talking about when we first tried some of them.

The inventor.

Yeah. I’m going to have to quit this, because I know enough now that I’m starting to get inhibited.

I doubt it. Is it difficult to sew the copper-wire drawing to the screen?

That one didn’t take very long. It doesn’t have so many joints, and it’s made out of heavier material. This one’s lighter. It’s the first I did and so a lot of the soldered joints weren’t very good. You heat one up and the other would fall off. We tried to make some paper with this one a week or so ago.

What was wrong?

It was so ripply that I couldn’t sew it down tight enough. So I took it over to Bill’s. Some of the joints had broken in the travel and such, so I resoldered it and we ran it through the etching press over there. That makes it flat enough, so that this is easier compared to the first time. I’ve found out since I’ve been here that I don’t have to use wire to make watermarks anymore. I thought you did.

What can you use?

Paint right on the screen. Just dab the paint on.

As old as watermarks are, recent research shows it’s the capillary action that forms when the surface is blocked that makes watermarks. As the water drains, it rolls over the blocked surface and sends the water and fibers to either side.

I love it because you can see the watermark just from one side. It disappears when the light hits it from both sides. Sometimes the ink goes on differently in the depression in the paper caused by the watermark. You couldn’t see it holding it up to the light, but an oblique light still shows it. I think I’m going to have to make a book of watermarks. Make it so small—handheld. And Bill and I are going to write a book about how to work with handmade paper. It’s fun because we have all these wonderful problems and errors. If we ever get it down, then we’ll quit. I’ll quit for sure. I’m not sure any of these are going to get published right now. They may not be finished. Only I know when I’m finished.

In some prints you deliberately use one side of the paper and others you print on both. Is there a reason?

It’s an accident.

It’s deliberately accidental. The grids are quite obviously, to me anyway, divided into two sides—they have two sides. But in the case of a round sheet, like the Shield, it pretty much stayed one side. I don’t think the watermark would have to be two-sided, especially since you have to stand on the dark side of it in order to see it. I don’t think that either way is right, I just do all that’s possible. These are embossing plates that I make, some out of silicone rubber and some out of plastic wood. I’ve used both in this print (Sensual Sipping). It’s the furthest along. The paper it’s printed on is unpressed and therefore too fragile for any dye process but very receptive to embossing. I don’t know how long plastic wood plates will hold up, but I’ve done 11 prints with this one so far. I print once and the relief will only pick up the top edges of the plate, so the next time I sand those top edges off, and it has a whole new contour to print from. But the dyeing process I first used in Sun, Moon, Title Page has altered quite a bit, because I’m using handmade paper. As much as possible, I try to manufacture the paper with its color in it and use laminations for the differences. One reason to make the paper myself is so I can choose the colors. Many of the papers I’ve been making are in the experimental stage, and I’ve just used them for watercolors. To get paper to the controlled state for a printed edition takes a little doing. This is actually the first time I’ve printed on unpressed paper.

Have you used the plastic matting from Shelter Island?

Yes. It works pretty good. I haven’t made editions yet.

Find the non-water soluble inks for hanging outside?

No. Not yet. Perhaps we’ll just find we’ll do a sign type thing on metal.

Glass is a problem because of the annealing process. You cool metal in a vat, and it won’t break, whereas glass will.

I can die-cut steel or whatever. I really want to do some of these things that can go outside because I feel a real need for art to go out there, not to be there to be in competition with trees but to hang on them and not to be in conflict with nature but to reflect it or get into it in some way that makes for intimate spaces in the outdoors. Like the beads and the light are one—it’s a beginning of that feeling-of the motion in my art and the need and fundamental desire to build big things. But to be within the reach of people; like Chicken Shit and the grids. If they could just be more self-substantial. Someday it’s going to work out. I’m just not in a hurry. I can’t be, because if I rush, it’s going to get rigid. If I let it come when I can find out about it comfortably, and in the right time, I anticipate that it will be great. And it may work out altogether differently than I’m describing, because I really don’t have a rigid ideal about what it could be. Maybe it’s going to be wind chimes, but they’re really going to be something else, you know?

Do you want to work today?

We intended to.

What do you accomplish in prints you don’t in painting?

It’s the same process. I guess probably they affect each other back and forth. I think I treat them equal—I try to treat them both with honest concentration. There’s no favoritism. I’m against favoritism in working in art. I don’t even have a favorite color. It’s just like farming. It’s good to rotate crops. It’s good to change media.

I was curious. When you’re involved with so many people, it’s a communal kind of thing and when you work on a painting, it seems like you work in isolation.

Well, I can isolate in my head too. It is a different experience. It’s not better or worse, it’s different in every respect. Like you say, there’s a lot of people around. It passes from my hands to other hands. It’s partially you have to trust it. Sometimes it’s too quiet to paint when you’re painting all by yourself. That’s why I paint fingernails, so that I can paint with the complete intimacy of the viewer of the work.

Are the fingernails art?

No. They ‘re not art. I’m not art.

Your whole family seems to be in the invention business.

Yeah, that’s the puritan ethic from my grandfather and my mother and father and all that stuff. The best thing is that my grandfather was able to relate to me even when I was very young. He was a teacher—a proper teacher. He wasn’t lofty—he was pretty quiet. He impressed me the most at first by rolling a cigarette with one hand. He was a very sharp guy. And my great-grandfather was an inventor of cattle. He worked to change cattle from the range-type cattle that needed long horns and long legs to survive, to a fenced-in animal. I have to do the same thing when I take my prints outside. I have to accommodate to different circumstances.

Did you like doing your very first print?

Not really. It was a silkscreen thing in 1969 that tried to copy a watercolor I’d done previously. When the printer was finished with it, I took the entire edition with me, took it down to my studio, laid it all down on the floor, and I spray-painted lines and I stitched a line so that when I did the numbers and the signature, it could be folded back so it wouldn’t be on the front of the print. It’s a satisfactory attempt, but it really revealed to me my lack of knowledge in prints. I just didn’t know what the hell was going on. I wasn’t eager from that experience to go jumping out.

But you’ve been working with Bill on prints for three years?

It’s three years because you’d just moved into this place.

Where were you before, Bill?

Venice. The Biennale. The whole printmaking thing really got going because I got so frustrated there. What a year. Rory O’Neil staked me to this place. I guess part of what’s happened here is that I react strenuously to the way academia trained me. Printing can be more liberal in terms of what you can do in editioning. The printmaker was limited because he had pegged himself as a printer, not as an artist. We’re trained as artists as well as printmakers, and the technical things are important. I’m not well trained in lithography and etching. I didn’t like it where I was a student, because of the technical complications and the time. I jumped into silkscreen because it was fast. Now I’ve got all the equipment, I find a lot’s not as difficult as I had assumed. I’m not stuck up with all these traditional things. And I don’t like to work with people who’ve made a lot of prints. Alan—now he’s made a lot of prints!—but he came in with all kinds of fresh ideas. Anything new was new for me and new for him and was exciting. And we just tried to do. We usually end up doing it the old traditional way, which happens naturally because we are inventive enough to do it. But a lot of times new things happen too. We’re not limited.

Nothing’s standard.

Nothing’s standard! As soon as you start doing standards on me, I rebel. And Alan’s not going to be tied down by any set of rules. Do it—that’s my philosophy—and as soon as you get a printmaker or someone who has been indoctrinated by a Tamarind situation or a Gemini situation you know it puts a lot of restrictions to what you can do—and at a tremendous loss. Here we have to work with our own limitations. Necessity is the mother of invention. We invent things all the time. Probably we’re reinventing. I don’t know if anything is really that new, but we find it more fun if we are the inventors. We discover the moon first or something.

It’s been up there for years. Flocking is your thing?

The flocking thing is not my thing. It was reinvented by me. I’m using a lot of what I’ve learned from Alan in my work, too. Though my work’s still very figurative, it involves a lot of the dyeing and stitching.

There’s a lot of similarities of mechanical appreciation.

I don’t think his attitudes and my attitudes are the same at all, but we both have an attitude that allows each other to exist.

I think Bill is much more open than I am.

Where do you think the variances are?

Well, I think it partially has to do with his family and the fact that he has one and I don’t. We do have similar attitudes about personal integrity, but that’s not unique to the two of us either. If anything, Bill’s a teacher. We both are teaching, we’re teaching each other so much and so often we just identify the end thing as art… but mostly it’s just a matter of we stumble across it and we find that we’re kind of withdrawn from the object. It’s very subjective and kind of abstract. Just like my paintings become tablecloths a lot of the time. I say they’re different things and I might use them for covering my car. I put them places and do things to them you’re not supposed to do to a painting because I know those rules, but I don’t. I’m well enough aware that that thing is going to be a painting again, maybe… but for then it’s a tablecloth. It’s receiving color because I’m working on the table with paint, so it’s a neat way to add processes on top of one another. Bill and I’ve got processes we haven’t explored yet. I don’t think I’ll go out of my way to discover a new process or find something new. I don’t feel obligated that way, I just continue. I think things happen because you continue to do stuff, not stop and ponder so much. We both stop and ponder a bit. Everyone does. We don’t talk about it. We don’t talk. Actually this is interesting we don’t talk much to each other. I know his attitudes but we haven’t said them a lot of times.

You don’t talk much! You guys never stop talking!

You dirty . . .