Along with visiting painter Andrea Caldarise and installation artist Sarah Philouze on Sunday, I also met two printmakers during the 544 Park Ave open studios.
Andrea Springer, A.J. for short, previously shared a work space in Maspeth, Queens for two years with Christina Pumo. (Pumo discussed her work with me in September during Bushwick Open Studios.) They moved into a studio on the second floor of 544 Park Ave about a year and a half ago. Springer said they were “looking for a bigger community to work with because [Maspeth] was a pretty isolated studio. We landed here and it’s been great.” She added that she likes the building’s friendly communal vibe where the neighbors “keep their doors open, they talk to you” and “there’s this exchange of ideas and community.”
A.J. Springer holds one of her drawings at her studio
Recent works by A.J. Springer (left to right) Untitled piece from her Submerged series; By Night; By Day
Originally from Long Island, Springer studied fine art and art history at FIT. She was introduced to printmaking in high school by the artist Dan Welden. Weldon “pioneered the solar printmaking process which imitates intaglio prints but it’s much less toxic,” Springer explained. “He came to do a workshop at my high school and saw my work. We connected.” Welden invited Springer to take another printmaking workshop in Vermont where her love for the craft grew. “He taught me this process and this process now is a huge part of my work, so I’m a big advocate for it.”
Springer enthusiastically discussed her process which begins with drawing on frosted Mylar (a transparent plastic). “The reason why I started drawing on Mylar, totally devoid of printmaking, was because I was doing these really aggressive-looking drawings. They were very emotional and intense. I was literally ripping through the paper,” she recalled. Along with being durable, the material provides Springer with another benefit. “What’s nice about Mylar is that you can pour water on it so I end up kind of painting [with the ink].… They’re drawings but they end up with these very painterly elements to them,” she explained.
A.J. Springer's By Night (left) and By Day (right)
A solar plate featuring a drawing by A.J. Springer
Once a drawing is complete, Springer exposes the transparency, treated with a light-sensitive emulsion, to a UV light box and transfers her image onto a solar plate. The metal plate is “meant to give you a photographic level of tone and imagery,” she noted. She then inks the plate by hand, or “à la poupée,” and runs it through the studio’s etching press onto rice paper. Once her print is made, she tears the rice paper off the plate and collages it onto her composition. “The reason why I print on the rice paper is because it’s transparent…. I’m kind of approaching [my work] a little more like a painting than a collage where I’m mixing, overlapping elements and colors. I tear away a lot. I scrape into it [and] kind of find the layers underneath. It’s a little bit less like placing carefully as collage. It’s a little more aggressive,” she said.
Springer also likes using rice paper because she can use a wet brush to outline shapes which “rip perfectly… follow[ing] the personality of the paper,” offering more organic, less “blocky” cutout forms than regular paper.
“I’m approaching it more like a painting than a collage,” she said of her work. “One of my hang-ups with painting was that I felt like everything I worked on was a little too precious, because there was only one. With this process I can print multiple versions of the same image and have multiple studies and I’m not afraid to mess one up because I have variables to work with…so I can become a little more experimental and mess around and make more mistakes which I think is really important in any art-making process, allowing yourself to fail.”
Springer said her intricate, moody, multi-layered works are influenced by psychology. “I explore a lot of these themes of duality and nature and suffering, and the ones I’ve been working on recently [are] more so about a relationship with the self,” she said, while another series titled Submerged depicts “a relationship with another person.”
Speaking of relationships with others, Springer says she loves sharing her work space with her studio mates. “We’re all really good friends, which is really nice for the process because we can share materials, share ideas, share everything.”
Check out Instagram to see more of A.J. Springer’s work.
Kirsten Flaherty moved into Springer and Pumo’s studio space in February after years of working from various print shops across the city. “I took the leap and made an investment in an etching press and Christina and A.J. were kind enough to let me in their studio," she recalled.
Originally from Westchester, Flaherty studied illustration at SVA where her professor Bruce Waldman introduced her to Carrier Pigeon, a quarterly illustrated fiction and fine art publication. While working at the magazine, Flaherty met Springer and Pumo. “Carrier Pigeon introduced me to a lot of different printmakers,” she said. “There’s just such a really solid printmaking community in New York. All the print shops, everyone working there, are very supportive of each other. There’s just a good, welcoming community that helps me foster my love for printmaking.”
Kirsten Flaherty's pit bull portraits
Kirsten Flaherty's pit bull portraits
Flaherty explained that “the drawing aspect” of printmaking is what attracted her to the medium. “I never really enjoyed painting as much as I did just sitting around and drawing in a sketchpad. Printmaking has such a focus on line work and detail…so I think that’s what really drew me to it.”
Flaherty works in mezzotint, a centuries-old printmaking process that “that takes a lot of time so not many people do it anymore,” she noted before demonstrating the time-consuming process. She uses a rocker, a semi-circular tool with small teeth along its edge, to create thousands of tiny dots on the surface of a copper plate, rocking the tool side-to-side for hours to cover the plate with divots that will eventually hold the ink. After the plate is "fully rocked"—which would print solid black—she uses a burnisher and a scraper to engrave her image onto the plate. “It’s basically a drawing,” she noted, “and when you’re drawing you’re knocking down all these little ridges in the plate so that it will print with whites or grays.” After her image is complete, she inks the plate and runs it through the etching press, noting that with mezzotint “you have to use a lot more pressure since there are such fine details in the plate.”
When asked why she insists on working with such a time-intensive method, she answered, “I’ve always been a fan of realism and hyper-realism and in something like etching or silkscreen or litho, you can’t really get a photographic quality like you can in mezzotint…. You can get really deep, beautiful, velvety blacks that aren’t possible in any other form of printmaking.” She added that the range of depth, tone, and detail that mezzotint produces is worth the extra time and effort.
Kirsten Flaherty uses a rocker to prep a copper plate for a mezzotint print
Kirsten Flaherty uses a burnisher to engrave an image onto a copper plate.
Kirsten Flaherty demonstrates using a burnisher to draw an image onto a copper plate for a mezzotint print.
Flaherty’s work has addressed the environment and animal rights, and according to her website currently focuses on “inspiring a more positive view of a nationally misunderstood animal”—the pit bull. “I have a pit bull, Otis...he’s my best friend. He’s such a loving, amazing companion,” she said of the eight-year-old dog.
She was inspired to create a print of Otis a couple of years back when Montreal was debating whether to institute a ban on pit bulls. “When they were talking about the BSL [breed-specific legislation] law, I was just trying to figure out what I could do to raise money for helping them fight against that legislation.” Flaherty donated 100% of the sales from the print to organizations protesting Montreal’s pit bull ban.
Though the ban was suspended in 2017, Flaherty has continued creating her pit bull prints, donating a portion of each sale to a non-profit animal shelter. “That sparked doing further projects with these pit bull portraits because I just really want to communicate to people just how loving these animals are and how much they deserve respect and kindness. There’s no reason for any dog to be put down, but especially just because of a breed and a bad reputation for things that they’re not at fault for,” she said. Her thoughtful portraits are capable of convincing even the staunchest pit bull critic to have a change of heart, with their rich tones illustrating the dog's beauty, vulnerability, and warm—and sometimes goofy—personality.
L-R: A.J. Springer and Kirsten Flaherty in their studio at 544 Park Ave in Brooklyn.
Flaherty also organizes pop-up exhibitions to raise funds for non-profit organizations, assembling a collection of work donated by various artists with 100% of sales going to groups such as VOCAL-NY, City Harvest, Sean Casey Animal Rescue, the International Refugee Assistance Project, the ACLU, and more. “I feel like it is a very small thing that people can do. Printmakers are such a good community that want to help out,” she said.
To learn more about Kirsten Flaherty and her fundraisers, and to see more of her work, visit kirstenflaherty.com.
Comments