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