I’m doing my last print today in the studio. I had a great run. I printed for 48 years. But as the
song goes, “You got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.” And I’m folded.
For me, the whole deal is about the physical object, the physicality of the plate, the physicality of the
acids. My ideal is just to honor the materials to the maximum.
When I got out of art school,
I got offered a job apprenticing to an etching printer. I knew from the first day that this
is something I could just do every single day. A friend of mine was working at Gemini, and I got
hired to print over there. I worked with a number of artists there: Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Rosenquist,
Richard Serra, and Michael Heizer. Then I met Sam Francis, who was kind of the big kahuna in this
town at the time. I did some printing for him. And then one day, Sam said, “You should just come
and work for me.”
The first thing Sam said to me when he hired me was, “I don’t care if we ever do
anything that’ll sell.” He said, “I just want to work with you and see where it goes.” And so that
was an ethos that I felt really comfortable with and something that I wanted to maintain
While I was working for him, I set up my own publishing company. I had a studio in
Santa Monica for many, many years. I wanted to only publish things that you had to get really
close to with a magnifying glass. Basically, the format of old master prints, things that
were done between 1400 and 1700. The whole art world was into this big print explosion. I mean,
aesthetically, I didn’t like it because I wouldn’t want to have any of that stuff around. It’s just
too loud. I just said, “Screw that. I’m going to do small-format black and white, and if nobody
likes it, I don’t care.” What I do is hardcore extreme etching. There is a range going to a
maximalist point where you can get the deepest, richest blacks and the most beautiful grays and
spectral highlights and tiny detail. I had this idea when Sam was alive. I said,
“The thing to do is to have a portable studio.” It was a great way to work with people in their
own studios because it was very natural for the artists. It’s really, really intimate. I’m
in their studio. I’m in London, or I’m in Paris, or I’m in Berlin, or I’m in Rome or Mexico City,
wherever the hell I am. So I’m in their environment and eating their food and into
their life and basically just hammering the whole time. I never worked with anybody whose work I
didn’t feel passionate about and wasn’t completely obsessed by. Every project was different, but it’s
all about honoring the spirit of the artist. It’s their work. It’s about actualizing their work and
the medium that I know. My goal is to leave no fingerprints. All you see is the artist’s work.
I’m just another pencil. I’m just another brush. But I want the pencil to be sharpened really well.
I want the brush to be sable. And to do that and be completely spontaneous, I trust the materials.
If you look at everything from Gabriel Orozco making prints from clothes-dryer lint to making
prints with Rebecca Horn that are the color of her blood and the color of her skin.
Like, with Marina Abramović, it was the first time we used the portable aquatint box. We didn’t know
what we were going to do. And so, it was really like a performance or something for her. If it was
just me, it would just be a bunch of test strips. It would be little squares of gray and black and
lighter gray. They would be good prints, don’t get me wrong, but it’s really all about the artwork.
Etching and publishing and collaborating with artists, it’s a performance sport. I
started surfing in ’65 when I was 13. It’s not a performance for somebody else. It’s performing for
yourself. You can’t control the ocean, but you got to perform. After MoMA acquired my archive,
I pretty much felt I was done as a collaborator and publisher. I feel a devotion to a level of
craft that I was trying to emulate. That’s what’s important to me. Otherwise, it’s just more junk.