THE “GICLEE”

In essence, a reproduction is a photo-copy (photographed or scanned) of an existing work. For the purpose of brevity, I’ll limit my comments to the most popular form of reproduction sold today …

“Giclee,” is a term fabricated in the early 90’s to describe a reproduction, printed from a specific large format ink-jet printer called an “Iris”. The term was concocted because, after all, who in his/her right mind would pay big buck$ for a lowly ink-jet print? But a “Giclee” … oooh, aaah … now THAT sounds like $omething $ub$tantial, does it not?

Today, “Giclee” has come to refer to any art reproduction printed off an ink-jet printer. As a matter of fact for the purposes of proof-reading, just prior to posting this entry I printed off a Giclee of it. :)
 
A while back, an artist friend graciously invited me to his studio to see exactly how the process works. After scanning the original, he played with the image on his computer, deftly altering the colours, the intensity and cut and re-pasted a number of different elements into different areas of the composition. When it looked just right to him, he pressed the “print” button…

The entire process, from the start of the scan to having printed out the final product, took a grande total of about 10 minutes – most of that time, due to the fact that his printer was a bit on the slow side.

So, back to the original topic of the reproduction and, specifically, the "Giclee". For those inquiring minds who want to know, here is the bottom line according to every legitimate fine art gallery and museum in the world:

However the image was reproduced, whatever the printing substrate (paper, canvas etc), however nice-looking the final product, and even the ever-so-popular signing and limiting the of the edition DOES NOT ALTER OR ELEVATE THE ESSENCE OF THE REPRODUCTION. Because when all is said and done …
- It is not an original print.
- It is not a piece of art
- It is a (scanned or) photo-copy of a piece of art.
“Caveat emptor,” indeed!

NEXT TIME:
I’ll examine the oft-asked question of which computer program/s I use when creating my work (and that ought to be interesting ;)…
The secrets will soon be revealed!

In the interim, below is a detail of an intricate border in one the pieces, about which I’m often asked the computer program used (to give you an idea of scale, from the centre of the bird's eye to the centre of the leopard's eye is 7 cm or 2.75").

This detail image is from, “Bashert”, by the way, which can be seen in the “Klezmer Kollection” gallery, 7 pieces from the top at http://iankochberg.com/ .

*originally posted on Ian Kochberg's Facebook group page - December 27, 2015

At our shows it seems that, time and time again, many of the same questions keep coming up; I thought I would take advantage of this forum to address some them. Here’s one which comes up at every show we do:

On your sign it says “original print” and “hand-pulled . . .”
What is “hand-pulled”, and how can a print be “original”?

An original print is an original work of art, conceived and executed solely as a print. The image does not pre-exist in any other media. In other words, it is not an image reproduced from an existing work of art; it exists only as a original print. There is no original from which copies are made; each print is an original.

The original print is produced from a single hand-made matrix or, if multi-colour, a series of matrices; it is created entirely by the hand of the artist or, in rare cases these days, that of a master printer. The type of matrix used is, typically, a metal plate, stone, wood block or screen (in my own work, I use multiple screens and metal plates).

In any fine art gallery or museum, an original print is considered to be an original piece of artwork, which exists in a multiple format. Original prints include etchings, engravings, dry point, stone lithography, and serigraphy. 

The original print with which most of us have some familiarity, is the potato print. The matrix used for each colour is a potato or, more accurately, a half of a potato. So, every colour requires a separate “potato” to be prepared. And although I do not use potatoes in my art, it may be easier to understand the original print in terms of the lowly potato print… 

It should be noted that I’ve spent up to 180 hours, working on a single “potato” for a single colour. If the edition is, for example, 100, once the first potato is ready, it is inked and printed 100 times on 100 sheets of prepared paper. The potato is then destroyed, and a new potato is prepared for the second colour. If the piece is to be, for example 12 colours, 12 different potatoes are prepared, printed from, and subsequently destroyed - one potato for each colour. After the colours are complete, I cut, engrave and etch metal plates from which I hand-print the embossing,. When the edition is complete, 100 original potato prints have been produced. The “original” would have been the 12 potatoes along with the metal embossing plates, all of which had been destroyed. The final image only exists as an original potato print.

“Hand-pulled” is a fine art term which means that the artist or master printmaker has literally pulled the paper from each stone or plate etc, by hand. This hand-made quality differentiates it from a mass-produce-able, machine-made reproduction. The process is very labour intensive; you cannot simply push a button on a printer and spit out an original print.
It should be noted (just to confuse matters) that, for every original printmaking method, there exists a corresponding commercial method of reproducing artwork. Next time, we will examine the original print’s nemesis … the “reproduction”. The reproduction is a glorified photo-copy or, more common these days, “scanned-copy”.

*originally posted on Ian Kochberg's Facebook group page - December 22, 2015