Get To Know The Master Printer
Center Street Studio with John Wilson
John Wilson came to Center Street Studio in 2001 to produce a suite of prints illustrating Richard Wrights short story Down by the Riverside on commission from the Limited Editions Club. As the studio’s master printer, I was publishing prints exclusively at that point and not taking on contract printing jobs, but made an exception for this enormous project—eleven plates, six prints, and over 350 impressions each!—as John was an artist whom I greatly admired for his talent and focus on social justice issues. I jumped at the opportunity to work with him.
John Wilson and James Stroud in the studio
At that time, it had been nearly thirty years since John made his last etchings in 1973. In his past practice, though attracted to printmaking for its democratic nature and the relative affordability, he still regarded the medium as largely a means of reproducing his drawings. This approach was unfamiliar to me: I regarded printmaking as a primary medium in itself, a technical extension of drawing and a method to sort out and explore ideas across the full range of artistic media. An art critic once described my role of master printer at Center Street Studio as that of a “midwife” who provides the space, environment, and expertise to help artists give birth to new works, inspired by ideas and images from their primary medium, but not necessarily reproducing them. This is the approach I applied during John’s time at the studio.
John Wilson and James Stroud in the studio
As we started working together, I remember his determination to struggle through the challenges of printing processes and techniques that were largely unfamiliar to him. 2 John learned quickly while working on The Richard Wright Suite, and returned to the studio to make another set of prints in 2001. That year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, received a loan request for Wilson’s portrait drawing of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be featured in the multi-venue exhibition In The Spirit of Martin. In order to mitigate the damaging effects of ultraviolet light, the fragile drawing could only be lent to the first venue of the show. To resolve this issue, at my suggestion John decided to make an etching inspired by the drawing, which could travel through the run of the show. In his print of King, he embraced the very facture of printmaking, finding the portrait through the complexities and serendipity of the etching process itself.
The first challenge we faced was how to reconcile the immediacy of John’s draftsmanship—so keen, swift, sure of hand, and precise—with the more fractured, methodical nature of printmaking. As any print is made by transferring an image made on an inked surface—in John’s case, copper plates—to a sheet of paper, it is common to periodically ink and print the plate throughout the process to see how the image looks and is developing before going back into the plate to make adjustments and alterations. For John, these intermediate states were critical—more than twenty survive for his print of King, for example—and the gradual process forced him to think differently and work more slowly, to take smaller steps and anticipate the results of his actions.
Martin Luther King, Jr., John Wilson, Center Street Studio
The prints from these transitional states provide unique insight into John’s train of thought—and struggle. With the portrait of King, his challenge was getting the likeness, quality, and character of the portrait just right—to capture the essence of the civil rights leader. John had collected photographs of King from throughout his life, and in his print, he sought the amalgam of youthfulness and maturity he saw in those images and captured in his drawing.
John’s print of King ended up measuring almost four times the size of the drawing, a difference credited to an accident of my own. I had mistakenly assumed the drawing was life-size—far larger than it is—and so presented John with an unexpectedly large plate. Although he first struggled with the thirty-inch surface area, which he deemed “so damn big,” John eventually embraced the scale shift. First, he photocopied and enlarged a reproduction of the drawing from the exhibition catalogue. To account for the reversal inherent in the printing process, he then placed the Xerox sheet face down onto the tacky, soft etching ground that we had laid over the copper plate. John then used a pencil to trace the contours showing through from the front of the sheet, pressing the paper into the soft wax as he drew. When he lifted the sheet off the plate, the soft ground was pulled away from the copper, stuck to the back of the paper. What remained was an outline of King’s head, exposing the metal of the plate, which we then etched. The soft ground captured the texture of both the pencil and John’s own finger- and handprints. The latter seen especially in the background of the print, I like to call “adding chatter”—visible signs of the artist’s presence, struggle, and process.
Head Study, John Wilson, Center Street Studio
For me, this work represents one of the first occasions when John embraced and leveraged printmaking in all its richness and possibility in order to create something unique from its original source. The many intermediate states of the print reflect a month of John’s work on the plate as he sought to capture King’s strength of character and an unmistakable likeness that nobody can dismiss. At first, John worked tentatively, etching only a little bit on the plate before saying, “Okay, print this. I want to see what I did.” Although it takes a great deal of time to ink, wipe, and print the plate, I’d do it. We’d hang the print up next to the previous state, and he’d exclaim “I hardly did anything!” After a few rounds of this, he then went to town and began working too aggressively, dramatically losing King’s facial features altogether. It got to a point where the face looked like it had been flayed. John’s shoulders slumped with despair when I pulled that proof off the plate, King’s face completely distorted. To lighten the mood I exclaimed, “John, just look at it this way: If you were Francis Bacon, you’d be home by now.” Laughing, he began to rebuild the portrait by what I can only describe as John sculpting the surface of the copper plate as he physically carved it back down to start again, rebuilding King’s form through line and tone. After printing and amending the resulting impression—a beautiful work in its own right—he reached the portrait’s final state, where the character of the figure, drawing, and technique were one and the same.
Following the print of King, we completed three more prints together, leaving a fourth, a self-portrait, unfinished before John passed in 2015. I often describe the etching of King as one of the most important prints to come out of my studio over the past forty years. John was a fighter. When you look at a work such as the King portrait, his prints seem to have effortlessly come into existence. However, my unique position as a master printer gave me the honor and privilege of serving this great man and artist, and bearing witness to his struggle.
