Today, we're honored to post the following interview with Paul and Valerie:
Website: www.tugboatprintshop.com
Best Way to Reach Us: tugboatprintshop@gmail.com
Current Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Paul Roden printing wedding invitations - flickr.com/photos/tugboatprintshop
Tell us a little about Tugboat Printshop. How did it get started?
We started Tugboat Printshop because we both wanted to keep making prints after graduating in 2004. Our initial ideas involved a lot of working with other artists to create editions, introducing other artists to the idea and possibility of being able to make prints (with a little help from us), and basically continuing the great visiting artist program at our alma mater, The University of South Dakota, Vermillion. Those ideas are still there, we’re just working slowly and deliberately on them.
Is Tugboat today similar to the vision you had for it when you first started?
Our vision has been evolving as we move forward—changing as we learn more about business and how to operate in the art world simultaneously as artists, printmakers, designers, and craftspeople. We’ve long been attracted to the democratic nature of printmaking and craft… We’ve realized a ton about what we can do—what services we can offer, but we are proud to have been able to narrow down what we do into what we want to do. We want to make prints!
Explorer Capsule 3000
The Deep Blue Sea woodcut series - tugboatprintshop.etsy.com
Valerie does most of the website stuff…Paul does the picture framing. We both have our own bodies of work—and the art we work on together. We have really only worked on two projects to date collaboratively—one that we’ve just started (The Deep Blue Sea woodcuts). We find that we work well as a team and spend a lot of time going back and forth in each stage of the making of our images—the conception, the drawing, cutting, printing, etc. We have a lot of blocks going at once so we can swap them back and forth. If we are working on our separate works, we are in our separate studios…We try to get a lot done every day, but there’s a lot that can mean!
Woodland Creatures collection on exhibit @ Estel Gallery, Nashville - flickr.com/photos/tugboatprintshop
When we started making the Woodland Creature prints late last year, we wanted to work together to get them done--we were both into the idea, and kind of needed each other to motivate the project along. Through this series, we learned how to package prints, display prints so that people would be willing to pay for them and take them home, and how and where to sell work. Individually, both of our work has a lot of detail, complexity, and edge-to-edge imagery; but when we started working together, everything just kind of simplified. The Woodland Creatures, we felt, would represent something by their simplicity and tidiness, they would have a contemporary edge by not having backgrounds, and also reflect something in that. We saw the new taxidermied animals exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where all of the beasties were displayed with no natural habitat, and grouped together by size and color, not continent or climate. It was as though these creatures were being prepared for their own extinction, artifacts of a natural time, but not involved members of an ecosystem. So our woodland creatures have no backgrounds. They are just little iconic reminders of the outdoors. People really respond to them. Our new collaborative series, “The Deep Blue Sea” is also a lot of fun to work on. Using color is great and we have a lot of ideas ready to explode in the next few prints. Down there, under all that water, is a complete mystery, a sci-fi wonderland right under our own backyards. We think that really reflects the uncertain, but potentially awesome, times ahead. Also, in the past few weeks, scientists now know more about Mars than the deepest parts of the ocean.
(clockwise from top left) Treehouse, Cave Dwelling, Dirty Livin’: A Simultaneous Narrative of Suburban Adolescents
tugboatprintshop.etsy.com and tagartgallery.com
Does your collaboration at Tugboat affect your individual artwork? tugboatprintshop.etsy.com and tagartgallery.com
We maintain a hold on our other work and are eager to get back to it—but we are working collaboratively almost exclusively right now and seems to work too… Tugboat’s prints are really this examination of subplots in our individual works.
(clockwise from top left) Microburst, Overflow, Coaxing, Deluge - tugboatprintshop.com
Color, ideas, and simplicity.
Like our previous interviewee, Laura Nugent, you guys have a strong online presence. What aspect of online marketing or e-commerce have you found most beneficial?
When we started making prints after school and with our new press, we soon realized that we needed a venue for our work. In school, there is this kind of path laid out for you, to go to grad school, to get an adjunct part-time job in Idaho to build experience, and maybe someday you’ll be good enough to apply to teach in a mid-sized Midwestern town, and if you’re crazy ambitious enough, lucky enough, or know the right people or something, you can get one of the several dozen printmaking jobs in major cities. Printmaking is a dying medium, but its not dead yet, and we think part of its salvation has nothing to do with academics, with poster printing, with t-shirt printing, with anything but making artwork democratically, that is to say, legitimately but affordably. The internet provides us with this venue for selling our prints. Like any new business, it takes time and energy, but it’s getting there. We try our best to keep up with it…to get people interested, looking and coming back to look again!
The internet is the future, and we would like to stay a part of it. Nothing will replace real life experiences, hopefully, but an online presence is cheaper and easier to manage than a real life store-front or art school. Paul fantasizes about making ‘vlogs’ telling people how to do stuff (mount artwork inside a frame more properly, cut a block of wood, print a block of wood) We just want to keep growing…keep learning…keep doing…
woodblock print tutorial - Etsy The Storque How-To
We view our operation as more than just a couple of people making prints and selling them under a tent. We talk a lot about the democracy of printmaking, and how artists have taken themselves from the social conversation by their own egos and introspection, and our little art fair tent is, to us, an examination of the intersection of art, life, and commerce (this is America, after all). Where we sell our prints is a sort of conceptual extension of the prints themselves. We make a bunch of them because a bunch of people like them, and we sell them where a bunch of people will be.
What’s on the horizon?
Vacation!
What’s the best part about life as an artist in Pittsburgh?
Cost of living is seriously like 1962 around here. We can walk to almost everything, the weather is mild (compared to Nashville summers and SoDak winters), and there is seriously a ton of stuff to do around the clock. And we are close to a lot of major cities in America.
Paul Roden prints at Pittsburgh's La Vie
Who are some other artists from Pittsburgh that people should know about?
There are a ton of good working artists in this town, and we don’t want to leave any of them off the list.
What is your favorite outing in Pittsburgh?
We are homebodies. But we love to have people over and grill with about half dozen or a dozen friends in the backyard. And listen to ballgames on the radio. The Pirates announcers are hilarious, last week, the play-by-play guy says to the color commentator: “This guy really reminds me of Madeline Kahn in ‘Blazing Saddles’” and then he sings a few bars of her lispy solo in the bar scene. Priceless.
To conclude, what are you three favorite available works at the moment and how can they be purchased?
It should be noted that many of our prints contain real live gold ink. While this seems to be a popular trend lately, we like to think about it adding a little bit of actual value to the work on paper.
Starship (collaboration)
The Deep Blue Sea woodcut series - tugboatprintshop.etsy.com
2 comments:
Wow - great interview, Dolan.
What wonderful work. I recently showed alongside Valerie at TAG and was immediately taken with her work. So much so, that my husband and I bought an etching of Valerie's called "Programmable Do-Gooders". We absolutely love it. The detail and intricacy of line is exquisite - every time we look at it, we see some teeny tiny detail we didn't see before. Having drawn with .25 pens myself, I can understand how fun it can be to make such little lines!
It's great to see their studio, too, as well as more of Paul's work. TAG had a few pieces of Paul's, which we really liked too, but it's great to see more. As much as I love the edge-to-edge work they both do, I love the Woodland Creatures.
It might feel like printmaking is a dying medium, but seeing their work makes me feel like it's alive and kickin'! Simply wonderful.
great interview and pics!
big fan of their work
rick
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