episode thirty-two | robert blanton

Published 5 February 2020

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 32nd episode of Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend), the internet's number one printmaking podcast. I'm your host, Miranda Metcalf. I release an episode every two weeks, and on the off weeks, I publish an article on the Pine Copper Lime website, which features images and maybe a bit more information about the artist I'm going to interview. I am so excited to share this episode with all of you inky fingered lovelies, so I'm gonna keep this intro real short, real sweet. Couple of quick reminders. We do have a Patreon with level starting at just $1 a month, and it's a wonderful way to keep PCL in your hearts and in your ears. Through this, you can pick up some sexy Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) stickers, buttons, a tote bag, or discounts at the online gallery. Link in the show notes, you know the drill, printmaking forever, shun the non believers. My guest this week is Bob Blanton, the founder and master printer at Brand X Editions in New York City. For the past 40 years, Brand X has printed for some of the biggest names in the 20th and 21st centuries in American art, from Helen Frankenthaler to Jeff Koons. They're known for their experimental approach to screenprinting, as well as the ability to take on exceptionally large scale projects. Blanton and the team at Brand X have been pushing both the quality and the technique of the screenprinting medium for the last four decades. In this episode, we talk about how Blanton built his now famous studio, what it's like to take on those ambitious projects, and working with all those big names and big personalities. So sit back, relax, and prepare to be a little star struck with Bob Blanton. Hi, Bob. How's it going?

Bob Blanton  Very good. Very good. And how are you, Miranda?

Miranda Metcalf  I'm good. I'm good. I'm really excited to chat with you today. So thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with me.

Bob Blanton  It's my pleasure, glad to do it.

Miranda Metcalf  So I know you just sort of by reputation, and by reputation of your studio, Brand X Editions. But I always start by asking my guests to give just a little description of themselves that I sort of summarize as who you are, where you are, what you do.

Bob Blanton  Well, I'm originally from Kentucky, and I came to New York in the early '70s to go to graduate school at Pratt Institute to actually get my Master's in printmaking. But that changed along the way. The graduate degree changed and I ended up being a painting major. And that's where my education is. I started college at Western Kentucky University. And I was very lucky, it was a small state school, and I hit a window when they had some extremely good teachers in their art department. And I got a BFA there. I had a fabulous printmaking instructor named Ivan Schieferdecker. He was a student of Mauricio Lasansky's at Iowa. And so he taught a very classical approach to printmaking. Emphasized the quality of the work and just being very professional about it.

Miranda Metcalf  So what do you do now in New York, then?

Bob Blanton  Well, I have my own studio now. And it was actually '73 when I started at Styria Studio printing. It was, I guess, maybe the finest screen shop in the city at the time, and they were working with Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Rauschenberg, brought them to New York from LA and had just finished a Lichtenstein project and a Warhol project, and I started work there and worked there for about four years, almost five years. And that's how I really got into professional printmaking. Then after that, I worked kind of freelance consulting for about a year, and then I started Brand X.

Miranda Metcalf  Wonderful. And so is that sort of how you came back to printmaking from painting?

Bob Blanton  No, when I was was in graduate school I needed to work, and so I got the job at at Styria just to support myself as a graduate student. I was getting ready to start my second year in graduate school. And I'd been working all summer at Styria, doing prints for artists. And when I got back to school, I realized, 'I can't do prints for myself.' I'm working all day in a print studio, and I needed something more direct. And I changed my major to painting at that time. But I continued working full time, nearly full time, at Styria. So I never did leave printmaking, I stayed with it the whole time.

Miranda Metcalf  Gotcha. And then, when you were growing up in Kentucky, was art a big part of your life? How did you know you were going to go to art school?

Bob Blanton  From the time I was, I guess, junior high, or maybe a few years before that, I realized I wanted to be an artist. My parents were very supportive of me, and I didn't have any formal classes until - I mean, just part of the school curriculum, I had classes. But then, about the time I was in ninth grade, I took some outside classes, took some oil painting classes, such as that, and kept getting closer, you know, more enriched by creating drawings and paintings. When I got out of high school, I went to Western Kentucky University. And I think because my drawing background was much stronger than my painting background, etchings just seem to be a more appealing thing to me at the time. Because it seemed to me closer to drawing than applying paint. And so I got to meet Professor Schieferdecker. And he introduced me to other mediums of printmaking. That's more or less how I got involved in prints, but I was very supported from the time I was little. I would draw with my grandmother who lived with us, we would draw together, and on rainy days, my friends would come over to the house and we would all get paper and pencil and draw and do different things like that.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, what kind of things would you draw?

Bob Blanton  Oh, we'd draw landscapes, you know, this was late '50s, early '60s, we would be drawing battle scenes and things that little boys would do.

Miranda Metcalf  So you were talking about particularly etching having that more direct connection to drawing, which was a bit of a comfort zone and a passion for you, but you ended up going to do screenprint. Did that happen in graduate school? Or was that through Styria? How did that sort of become your life?

Bob Blanton  Well, I did mostly etchings in undergraduate school, but oh, I guess in my second year, during the summers, and during school, I was still working a lot. All summers I was working, and during school, I would be working part time. And I was doing a lot of construction work, carpentry work, building houses and apartment things, depending on what the contractor was doing. But I just realized that I didn't want to do that anymore. And I thought, well, what kind of job can I get? What can I apply for? And I realized I had some skills at silkscreen because of being introduced to it at school. And I applied for a job at a silkscreen shop, doing t-shirts and signs and banners and things like that. And so I got commercial exposure to it in undergraduate school. So when I came to New York, my teacher, Ivan, told me about studios like this and like Styria, and so I decided to pursue that and I started looking for a silkscreen shop that I could work in because I was just very comfortable printing silk screens at that point.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, definitely. And then so you're talking about how you worked there, and then you took a year off. What made you know that you wanted to start your own shop and that Brand X had to come into being?

Bob Blanton  Well, I left Styria and I was doing work for an artist named Clayton Pond. And then I was also working out of Jim Rosenquist's studio and printing with Susan Hall out of Jim's studio. And I was just thinking, I had the feeling that this was not going to last very long for me. That how long can I support myself with this very narrow, you know, setting up studios and artists' studios, and I felt like it was important for me just to go ahead and set up my own. Take the chance, rent the space, and do it myself. And use my contacts, like Jim and Clayton and the people I met at Styria, to bring clients into the studio and pursue it on my own that way in a more professional way, instead of a freelance way.

Miranda Metcalf  Right, yes. So how did you go about actually kind of starting it? Was it easy to find a space to rent? I mean, this was in New York in 1979, correct?

Bob Blanton  Yes, exactly. 1979. I had a partner at that time, Bill Wygonik. And he and I both looked for a space, and it wasn't that difficult. We found a very reasonably priced space on West 27th Street, which is, we were just on the edge of Chelsea at that point, not quite in the art district, but a block away from it. And it was a long time before the galleries started moving into Chelsea. And we found a nice comfortable space. Another printer, Sheila Marbain, who printed silk screen, she did Andy Warhol's first silk screen edition, she had a space in this building, and she called us up and told us that we could find a space there. And so we found the space, and it was a nice, comfortable, like a quarter of the size of what we have now. And back then, it was affordable. Things have gotten to be, the overhead has gotten to be so serious, it makes it... I don't see how young people can start today. But then, it was manageable.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I think that's something that, when I talk to people out in the world, and printmakers, a lot of them have that ambition, to start their own editioning studio, start their own community shop, something like that. And it just seems like the ticket to entry is so much more insurmountable than it was 40 years ago, unfortunately.

Bob Blanton  It's so much more. And you know, somewhere along the line, I guess the late '70s and early '80s, it started changing from - it was very friendly, the publishers were doing it because of the love of the medium and wanting to do prints, and the artists would go to their gallery and say, 'Let's do a print.' And the galleries would say, 'Oh, sure, go do a print.' And they would facilitate, they'd help out, and you had a lot more fun. And the overhead was much lower, everything was just a lot more relaxed, and fun. And now, the overhead, and it's become an industry, too. Every print that you pull is worth so much more now than it was when I started. Everything has a price tag on it, and it becomes much more problematic to do it. And it's taken some of the fun out of it. It's gotten so much more serious. The aesthetic challenges, technical challenges, are still there, which are greatly satisfying. But the relationship with the artists and the galleries is so much different. It was much more casual, it was harder to get paid by the publisher back then. But you had a lot more fun doing it. A very different atmosphere now.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. What do you think accounts for that shift that happened? When you say tax shelters, I'm having a bit of a memory of hearing about that, and actually how it did change some of contemporary art making, but I'm sorry, I can't exactly remember what it is.

Bob Blanton  I think that people are recognizing the value of these prints, that they could really be making money off of them and everything. And it was kind of a natural progression of the of the medium, you know, Tonya Grosman and Universal started back in the '50s selling Jasper Johns prints for $50. They'd do a small edition of 30, 40, for $50 apiece. Now those same prints are priceless. I don't even want to venture like what the value of one of those early prints would be. So it's people who started seeing the value of prints, and they became a real commodity, instead of Bob Rauschenberg doing it out of love and wanting to do an edition. Just wanting to create a multiple image. And now... everything was counted, and documentations were very important at that time. And I'm not trying to diminish the value of what was being done then. But I think the marketing and people understanding that it's an industry, and it became one. One of the big things I think that helped do this was the advent of the tax shelters in the '70s, which created a lot of studios. There were a lot of printmaking studios, because the government was subsidizing huge tax shelters to create prints. It brought a whole different group of people into the industry. And I think that was one of the things that pushed it to be more of a business than a pursuit of good art. The tax shelters, it was around '74, '75, something like that. You know, there's always been tax shelters for real estate. You're developing a piece of property and the government says, 'Okay, if you develop this piece of property for business at this place, we'll give you, for every dollar you invest, we'll let you write off $2 or $3, something like that, on your taxes.' The film industry has always worked on tax shelters. Well, the clever accountants managed to get it so that there was a big tax write off to get investors to put in money to produce editions by artists where they would invest the money, invest a big lump of money, say $10,000 or $100,000, into this. And for that year, if they show that at least all the plates or screens and positives and everything had been made, they get to write it off for that year. And they get to write off a multiple, I'm not sure what that multiple was, but they would get to write off, you know, if they invested $10,000, they'd get to write off $20,000 or $30,000 or more - I don't know what that multiple was - on their taxes. So there's a lot of people that would be wanting to shelter some money would invest in this way. And in the end, they would get their tax write off, plus they would have an edition of prints to sell. So it produced a lot of work, a lot of work. So many, there were many studios set up that were just doing tax shelter work. And that lasted for, I don't know, less than 10 years, I guess. 5, 6, 7 years. Brand X had only one project of that nature. We just kind of avoided it. But we had worked with Marisol at Styria, and she got in touch with us to do a project, and we did that one. And then that was the only one that we got involved in.

Miranda Metcalf  That's really interesting, because like I said, when you were talking about it, I was like, 'Oh, I feel like I've heard this come up before.' It's such an interesting part of that history. And was the tax shelter, was it specific to New York State? Or was this something that affected the whole country?

Bob Blanton  That's a good question, but I think it was pretty much the whole country. I think it was a federal tax shelter that they were working with, for your federal tax, and not necessarily New York state tax. But I could be wrong on that.

Miranda Metcalf  So kind of just like going back to those early first couple years of Brand X, you mentioned a little bit about going to a gallery and saying 'Hey, you represent this artist, we'd like to do an edition with them,' is sort of what it sounded like. Is that sort of generally how you got in contact with artists? Obviously you had some connections to begin with, but approaching a new artist, was it generally done through their gallery?

Bob Blanton  Well, we did it both ways. We would try to do however we could personally make a personal contact. If Jim Rosenquist, who was a close friend at the time, if there was somebody that... we would let it be known that we need work, and he would steer people our way. Or we would go to a gallery. We very rarely asked for specific artists. In the early years, we were really scrambling and trying to work with with whoever we could at the time, and we talked to Brooke Alexander, lengthy conversations with him. He helped us out. There was Maurice Sanchez, he's another printer who was helping us, he's a little bit older than me, and he was helping us a lot. There's a good community. One of the things that helped us the most was that Styria had a great reputation for doing quality work, quality silk screens, and people knew that we came from Styria, and so they would work with us. But we would talk to the artist and we would talk to the gallery. So much of it, in the early years, we were just trying to promote ourselves, but so much of it just happened naturally. And we were working very hard to to try to get more work in. But if, say, we talked to Brooke, it might be a year or so before Brooke would bring in a project for us. And so just by staying out there, it would lay the groundwork to bring in future work. But for the immediate stuff, it was pretty slim at times. But we had enough work to keep us going. Petersburg Press. They haven't been around for some time, but they were very important when we started the studio. They were doing large prints by David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein. And they called us and asked us if we could do big prints. And sure, you know, we can do big prints. And so we did that. And we got a reputation for doing large prints with Petersburg Press. And Frank Stella was doing a huge project with Petersburg Press and Alan Cristea in London. They ended up coming our way, and we did two big Frank Stella projects that were oversized prints. And it all just kind of happened organically. Then, once we got pigeonholed for doing big prints, now we have a lot of big prints to do. A lot of big prints.

Miranda Metcalf  I bet. And so when you would talk to artists or find someone to work with, would they know exactly what you were talking about? Would they be familiar with the editioning process, with silkscreen, with what that entails? Or was it more of a learning curve?

Bob Blanton  Oh, it was a learning curve. Most of the artists had no idea of how silkscreens are done. And we would set up with them and tell them, if they were drawing their positives, we'd tell them, 'Draw everything that you want blue.' And then they would do that, and then we would take the positives and correct and go to the screens and do it. But we would spend a lot of time just sitting down and talking with the artists and looking at their work and getting a feel for their work. And most of them, they're involved in what they're supposed to be doing, in making art. And not the technical side of things so much. They would know that they want to do a print, and somebody said, 'Well, why don't you do a silkscreen?' And they would come to us. And they would have no idea, they would have no idea which side of the screen the ink goes on. We would talk about stuff, and they would tell us what they want, and sometimes it would be pretty direct and we'd know what to do, and other times we'd have to come up with techniques and processes and figure it out. Because the artist just didn't have 20 years of experience to do something and wouldn't know how difficult something would be, or how easy it could be. That's part of the real collaborative process. The artist is in charge of the aesthetics and the art, and we're in charge of making sure that it gets translated in the proper way onto the paper, metal, whatever we're printing on.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I'm glad you're speaking a bit to the collaborative process, because that's really something that I'm very keen to hear more about. Because you're working in big prints with big names, and you've spoken to it a little bit, but I'm kind of just curious about, if you know you're going into a project, what's your mindset like? How do you prepare? Do you have guidelines? Is each artist really different to work with? What's the actual process like?

Bob Blanton  Well, you know artists, and you know that each artist is very unique. An artist would come into the studio and say, 'Hey, can you show me something like mine?' Well, no, because nobody else does something like you. And you would be annoyed with me if I showed you, 'Oh, this is exactly like what you do.' Because all artists are unique. And so you spend a lot of time just getting to know the artist and working with them. I've worked with artists where they'll describe a color to me, and they'll be telling me how to mix a color in the way they would do it with their oil paint. Which colors to combine and put together to make that color. And I would say 'Great, okay.' And I go to my palette and I'd mix the color and come back, we print it, he'd go, 'Okay, that's great, how'd you do it?' And I would have done it very differently than the way he told me because silkscreen pigments are different than oil painting pigments. But by him telling me how he would do it, I would understand what type of quality he wants to that color, whether it's transparent, or a grayed out version of the color, or if he wants it vivid, and I would know what types of colors to combine to do it. So you have to listen to the artist, and understand what they're trying to get, not so much what they're saying. Many of these artists are just amazing painters, I've worked with some really great artists, but not all of them are very good communicators. And so you have to learn how to talk to them, and learn how to understand them, and keep your eyes and your ears open and be receptive to them. And understand that they're the master. They know what they're doing. They know what their art's supposed to look like. They're the ones in the museums. So my job is to make sure that their work is represented faithfully when it comes to the print. So I have to talk to them and communicate and figure out what they're trying to say to me. 

Miranda Metcalf  That's a really interesting way of putting it, it almost sounds like you're a translator.

Bob Blanton  Exactly. We're taking what they're talking about, their experience, and putting it into a medium that they're not familiar with, for the most part. The collaborative process, we're never just reproducing a piece of artwork, we're trying to work with the artist and get the spirit of what they're trying to do as much as we're trying to capture that image and reproduce it. if it's gonna be reproduced, you might as well do a digital photograph or a big c-print. We're trying to do something that gives it the same feeling and beauty and surface as the artist's work. Like working with Chuck Close, he very rarely says, 'Make that color that color.' He'll say that 'This relationship between these colors are not right. We need to do this,' or the relationship in this quadrant, that has, say, 30 colors in it, needs to be adjusted. And we need to just do something to it. So we listen to him and understand what he's saying. He will worry very much about how the mark looks. We can't draw a mark that looks like my mark, it has to look like his mark on the piece to make it work. And every artist is different. The things that are important to him are extremely different to... we do a lot of work with KAWS, which is, there's a big show in Australia now. Just opened up at the museum. 

Miranda Metcalf  There is. Down in Melbourne, yeah.

Bob Blanton  And the suite of prints they have for sale there are ones we just finished, and signed them last month and sent them down there. But Brian really demands that the colors be exact, I mean really, really matched, the edges be perfect, and the surface be perfect. And he's very demanding. He does not compromise on it. He sees things that I don't ever see, and I just say, 'Oh, yeah. Okay. I'll buy it.' And we go back to the studio and we work on it, and we get it more the way he wants it. And that type of artist who really knows what he wants, even if it's like almost impossible demands, like very precise. 'I want it like this, I don't want it almost like that, I want it like this.' In many ways, they're the easiest people to work for. It's the ones that really don't know what they want, they keep you up in the air, that you're constantly guessing, they present a different problem. They may accept things a little bit looser, but we don't have a firm idea of what we're heading towards.

Miranda Metcalf  I can definitely see that. I think that sometimes people, through movies or something like that, they get this idea of working with an exacting, precise, demanding artist is just this emotional trial and that kind of thing. But I can completely see that as the collaborative printmaker, having someone who knows what they want and can express it directly, even if it takes more time and a little more elbow grease, there'd be a relief in that.

Bob Blanton  It makes it so much easier. We worked with Helen Frankenthaler for years, and I can remember the first time I was taking a proof to her. I had heard horror stories about her, and the studios, [they] were just awful. And I was sitting there in her studio, she was a few minutes late because she was just getting back from her dentist where she had a root canal. And I'm going, 'Oh no, what am I gonna do,' right? And she comes in, and we look at the work, we talk, a good conversation, she tells me what she likes and what she doesn't like, and I go off and change it. But she was always direct and knew exactly what she wanted. And we had a great relationship because she was the master. She knows how her work is supposed to be. And so we would make it make it the way she wants it. Not the way we want it, the way she wants it. And we had a great relationship because of that. Never had a moment of trouble with her.

Miranda Metcalf  I love that. Yeah. So just thinking about this, working with artists that, perhaps printmaking, and particularly silkscreen, isn't their primary medium that they work in, I was just sort of curious about, do you think that this idea that some pieces need to be done in print, that some pieces just need to be silkscreens? And sort of why that might be?

Bob Blanton  I hadn't ever thought about that until today. You gave me a little bit of a heads up of what we're gonna be talking about, and thinking about a painter's work, like Chuck's, there's not a real need. His aesthetic does not say, 'Make me a silkscreen. Do this.' Right? Brian, on the other hand, with his hard edge work for KAWS, he fits right in to the silkscreen mode of working. And it almost makes more sense to do them as silkscreens than it does as paintings. Because we can make those edges and control those edges so much easier. His paintings are beautiful. I was looking at them yesterday, and I can't believe he doesn't mask the edges. They just hand paint them. And they're beautiful, and wonderfully done. And so his work just says, 'Do me as a silkscreen.' We're working with another artist, Adam Pendleton, who we're printing one, two, three layers of black onto different surfaces. And we do a lot of work on a mylar that he likes to work on. And because of the surface that he wants - and these could be done, you could put them through a digital printer, right? And you would get a facsimile of what we're doing, you'd get something that would be flatter, that wouldn't be as rich, but the way he wants his surface and everything to look, they have to be silkscreen. It really is necessary to make them silkscreen. Robert Indiana, who we've done a lot of work with, is so natural with the silkscreen process. It works. You know, when I started the business, working at Styria and starting the business, the silkscreen method has come a long way since then. But at that time, people were in love with lithos. And they kept saying, 'Can you make your inks look like litho? Can you do this to make it look like litho?' And we would work so hard to get the crayon look, and that type of effect in our screens. In the intervening years, the technology for the silkscreen processes have improved so much that we've done three, four, five prints with Vija Celmins, her beautiful graphite drawings, that look more like drawings than lithos of her work would. But it doesn't necessarily, you know, her work does not say 'Make me a silkscreen.' It takes a great deal of effort to make hers a silkscreen, whilst Robert Indiana's work is just a direct translation from his painting to his screens to his edition prints.

Miranda Metcalf  When you were talking about the fact that you were being asked to make a silkscreen look like a litho at some point, and that you've got artists with these really specific ideas they'll come in with, Brand X is known for not only working large, but also being experimental and pushing the boundaries of what silkscreen can do. And I'm just curious if there's any particularly difficult or exciting or just standout projects kind of within that realm over the last 40 years that you can speak to?

Bob Blanton  Well, I'll list a few for you, then you can tell me if they're... we did some big Jeff Koons sculptures, flat pieces, where he would do a balloon animal. The first ones were a bunny, a balloon bunny, that was nine feet tall and five feet wide, that would be out of cut steel, shaped like the balloon bunny. And we would print the image photographically onto the plate. And we really were running into size limitations for how to make the screens. We were making some of the biggest screens that, well, that most people had ever seen. I've never seen bigger. If I said that they're the biggest screens ever made, somebody would call you and say, 'Hey, look, no, these are bigger.' But these were huge screens that we were printing, something almost 10 feet long and 5 feet wide with. And we ended up doing balloon monkeys, with a tail extending off of it, it was almost 10 feet high by 10 feet wide. And the tail would be halfway down one side. So when we're printing it, we print by hand, everything. The big things. And so there's one person on either side of the screen, holding the squeegee and pushing the squeegee, and you would walk the length of the screen, right? Well, in this case, there was a tail halfway down, so you couldn't walk through it. So we were having to walk down - Steve Sanginero, who was at Styria with me, would be walking, and he would come down to where the tail was. And I would reach across the tail, and pick up the squeegee and apply the same pressure that Steve is without stopping to continue the pass of it so that there would be a continuous - if you slowed down too much, or you stopped, or the pressure changed, you'd see a line where the squeegee changed. Well, he started in 1977, when he started printing, and I was a few years ahead of him. So he has over 40 years of experience. So we had nearly 100 years of experience of printing silk screens on that side of the table. So that type of, you know, the size and scale and the exactitude that Jeff demands made those very, very demanding, difficult projects. We're doing projects right now with Rashid Johnson where we're hand-coloring the prints, we're printing a resist, we print the negative shape. We're printing that, it's a black and white image, so we're printing the negative shape white to seal the paper, and we're doing multiple layers of that. And then we're coming back on top of that with a modeling paste and some, I think, graphite in it, graphite powder, and black pigment. We're covering the whole sheet with that like you would an etching plate, and then wiping it off. And leaving a build up, and where the paper is exposed and not covered with ink, it gets the black on it, and it wipes off the resist. And it's very, very difficult. And one of my printers, James Miller, is in charge of that project and doing that. And he's another Styria alumni, I hired him in 1978. So three Styria printers there with a lot of experience, and so that's a very challenging project. The Stella, I think it was the Had Gadya series, and Moby Dick, I think, is the second [series] that we did. Very involved, where in Stella's studio, they were printing lithos and linoleum prints, we were doing silkscreen, and then the layers were being cut out and put together. Lots of collage work. There was even marbled paper on those. Very involved. And the collaging part took nearly as long as the printing part to get done on those.

Miranda Metcalf  And those were editioned as well?

Bob Blanton  Yeah, they were editioned as well, they were done mid '80s, I guess. Yeah. I would say mid '80s to maybe 1990, something like that. It was a big - Waddington, out of England, with Petersburg Press, I believe, published those. It was a nice series. Those were some innovative things that we were doing. As far as quality, demanding work, the KAWS work that we're doing now, my two printers that are putting those together, Alex Mercedes and Roberto Mercedes, have just pushed the limit on the surface and edge quality, and they're always good at color, but the surface and edge quality that Brian wants is really difficult. And it's very funny, they've been with me a long time, they've been with me over 20 years. But we had done big Indiana prints before then. And at the show we're having, that big show at Pace right now of the 40 years of Brand X, they were looking at the big Indiana print from the Hartley series, it's 77 inches by 55 or something, a very big Indiana. And Roberto was looking at it, a little disdainfully, saying, 'You wouldn't get by with those edges now.' And I printed those. He was criticizing me a little bit.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, wow. Listening to you talk about it, what's really striking me is that I think printmaking in general, there's a real physicality to a lot of it, talking about moving big litho rocks and this kind of thing, but when you're talking about working on a piece that's 10 feet by 10 feet, that must be such an embodied experience, and getting that timing right, it's like being a dancer or an athlete or something to a certain extent, because it has to be precise in a physical way.

Bob Blanton  It's extremely challenging. That project, the bunny project, being 5 foot by 10 foot, it fit in a spray booth, where they would spray the sculptures in his studio, and so we went directly to his studio and did it in a nice clean environment there. Well, he calls us up and says, 'Hey, can you guys do this?' And I said, 'Well, let me do some research and find out about the screen material and what we can do, and if we can do it,' and next thing I know, I mean like a week later, before I call him back, he calls me and says, 'Well, the piece is being delivered.' I go, 'Okay, I guess we're doing it.' And we had to work all this stuff out, and we had to build a clean room, and we had to go through really a lot of preparatory processes to get to where we want. And then, you know, we just knew it was going to be just so physically challenging to do this. And I don't know if I would have trusted doing it if it was not Steve and I on the side of the screen that we had to do the pass on. And later on, after the guys - I have such good printers there - after they saw what we were doing and could get into it, well, maybe I would be unavailable for the afternoon. I couldn't be there. Well, they went ahead and did it themselves. And sure enough, they could do it. And it was, for us, you know, that's pushing the parameters. And Steve will be, he's working on - he just finished an Alex Katz piece that's 108 inches long, I think, is the image, and it's 42 to 44 inches wide. A long, narrow image. And he would be talking to me and telling me about the problems he's having with this happening, the surface of the ink, doing this, and I would tell him, I'd say, 'Steve, look, silkscreen was never meant to be this big. It's supposed to be like, you print the front of a T shirt or something like that.' And so not only are we having problems incurring issues of satisfying the artists, we're coming into issues that just the medium was never designed to do.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that's such an interesting point. Yeah, that you're really kind of like making the aspect of the medium kind of bend over backwards while playing the piano a bit.

Bob Blanton  Yeah, exactly. Other people do it, too, so I can't say that we're pioneers and breaking new ground, because other people are printing big things, too. But it does cause real issues. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and I can just imagine when you're going to be pulling, let's say, like the first one, and you've got a huge sheet of paper. I mean, I'm just imagining this moment where, I mean, what do you say? Do you just kind of say like, it's now or never, light a candle to the silkscreen saint?

Bob Blanton  Oh, yeah, yeah. Now, let's say on the Alexes, you know, say we need 70 prints when we're finished. 70 prints to sign for the publisher. So we would run 100 sheets of paper. So if you lose one, you don't worry about it, right? You know what you're gonna do, so you have 30 pieces of paper you can lose. But say on the Jeff Koons, there was one piece of metal, and we had to print it perfect every time we printed it. And if it didn't work out, we would have to wash it off and start again. And on these last ones, on these monkeys, there was, say, 25 different printings, some much more difficult than others. Some that would be real problems, and others that would be pretty much, I mean, you'd have to try to mess them up. But every time we pull them, see, we would get 15 colors into it and be pulling one of those difficult prints, and it just wouldn't work. Or we'd print it perfectly, and there'd be a piece of dust in the ink. And we would have to decide to clean it off and start over again. And Jeff is very demanding too. They look at everything, and they do not want one piece of dust, they do not want any flaws. And Jeff, it may be his mantra, he'll look at you and say, 'Do you think you can do it better?' And I've found that, you know, sometimes I would say, 'Yeah, I think we can,' and when we've done it as many times as we think we can do it and it's not gonna get any better, I'll say, 'No, I don't think so.' And Jeff says, 'Okay.' 

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Bob Blanton  There again, he's one of those people who demands a lot. And he's very clear about what he wants. So you do it, and when you've hit that quality limit that is there, he accepts it, he'll go with it.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And it almost seems like that's sort of the best of both worlds, is you've got someone who knows what they want, you've got someone who's pushing you. But they also believe you when you say, 'This is it. This is the absolute best.'

Bob Blanton  Exactly, exactly. Now there's many examples of where, at Brand X, we could be doing a print for an artist, and they approve something that, it might be aesthetically, might be the right color, pretty much the right shape and everything going down. But it would not be the quality that I like. I would be looking at it from a craft point of view. And I'll change it. I'll just say, 'No, this is not good enough.' And most of my people will come to me and - I mean, Roberto will show me things about the KAWS prints that he prints and say - and I can't see it - and he'll say, 'I think we need to fix this.' I'll go, 'Okay.' But we, my printers and I, we push our quality limit to make sure that we're happy with it before we show it to an artist and then we can be clear and confident that he's not gonna be talking about our part of the job, he's gonna be talking about the art part of the job that needs to be adjusted or changed.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that's a really important distinction, isn't it? When you're showing it to the artist, let them, like you were talking about, let them do their job being some of the people who are the very best at what they do, and doing specifically what they do, specifically their aesthetic, their craft. Just let them live in that space and almost, in a way, make your work a little invisible from its quality in that moment.

Bob Blanton  Yes, exactly. Exactly. And, you know, the quality of the work should be secondary to the aesthetic. People shouldn't be - this beautiful Rashid Johnson print that we just did, the full color one that's larger, to me, it's an amazing print. I love it. It's a great piece. I want people to walk up to it and say, 'That's a beautiful piece of art,' and then, second, go, 'And by the way, it's printed really nicely too.' And if that happens, we've done a really good job.

Miranda Metcalf  I think this is a really good bit of a transition into my next question, which was, how do you know when a print is done?

Bob Blanton  We'll be looking at an image, and many times, we have, say, a digital print. An artist will send us a digital print and say, 'This is the image that we're working from,' but then we depart from it. We do other things with it, or through discussions with the artists - like with Rashid. His stuff is very raw, very tough. It's not delicate and pretty. And we have to capture that spirit in the piece. And if we don't have that spirit in the piece, then it's not finished. And we'll look at it and we'll say, 'Well, we have all the colors that we think we need in it, but what's missing here? What's not doing it?' And we'll say, 'Well, this place is not complicated enough,' or, 'This place is over complicated and it's obscuring this,' and we have to go back. And many times, we catch it during the proofing process. When we're printing and proofing, we have the philosophy that we push the limit of what we can do with the stencil. And then we'll stop when we think that we have enough. We don't go too far with it. Because in 90% of the work that we do, you can always add something at the end. Like with Rashid's piece, this piece, we made it tough and raw, we captured the surface qualities, the different flat and glossy surfaces and reflective surfaces. But one area, what he called "dirt," has like very smudgy drawing type stuff on it. He says, 'This area is not quite dirty enough.' But for me, that was okay, because we didn't make it too dirty. And if he said it was too dirty, we may have to go back and reproof everything and change everything and take the chance of not getting there again. We eased up on it, we got to the point where everything was right except this one area, so we could just add something on top and make that work. And many times we'll see it ourselves and say, 'Well, we have to make this tougher.' Like these hand-colored pieces that we're doing for him, we went through several proofing stages with it and came up with different combinations of the modeling paste and the graphite and pigment and throwing them out as we're going until we got to the point where we said, 'That looks like Rashid. Let's take that one to him.' I just showed him an example of another piece of work, and he says, 'Yeah, let's work with this for this piece.' And so just by my conversations with him and understanding pretty much what he's trying to do, we were able to work pretty much without guidance to get something that had the spirit and feel of Rashid's work.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I feel like that's such a great answer, and speaks so much to your role as the collaborative printmaker, that a piece is ready when it has that essence of the artist that you're working with inside of it.

Bob Blanton  Right. And it's not about reproduction. You know, if you want a reproduction, you do the photo work type of work on it. It's about capturing the spirit of the piece and what the artist is trying to do. If it's like Helen Frankenthaler, the freedom and color that she's trying to get across. Rashid, you try to get the toughness and rawness of his image, or KAWS, you're trying to make something clean and crisp and colorful. So each artist has its own, and everybody, like I said earlier, every artist is different. Every artist is unique.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and that really makes such an interesting role for you to have as someone whose craft is so chameleon-like, where so many artists, particularly artists at the level that you're working with, they have a very distinctive, developed aesthetic. They have theirs. Like, a KAWS is a KAWS. A Koons is a Koons. A Frankenthaler is a Frankenthaler. You kind of weave in and out, getting sort of little tastes of being a part of that aesthetic for a certain project, and then starting back from the beginning and relearning something totally new.

Bob Blanton  And that's one of the beautiful things about print shops like mine. And this is certainly not unique to Brand X, but every project is new and every project is is interesting. You're not printing type on a real estate sign over and over again for 10 years. Everyone is unique and different. And about the time you start getting really good at something, the project changes and you have to get really good at something else. So it's meeting the artist and understanding their aesthetic and figuring out their problems is what makes the job so interesting. You have something really fulfilling at the end to see, this beautiful object that you've made, but there's so much more satisfaction to be gotten from all the other steps, from the communication, from the problem solving, all the way through to the end.

Miranda Metcalf  That being said, do you have any advice for aspiring collaborative printmakers? People who might be listening to this podcast and thinking that, you know, they know this is what they want to do, is they want to be this translator, this conduit, this artist who works with artists in this way. Do you have anything that you want to share with them?

Bob Blanton  Well, I think one of the things, two things I learned early on at Styria really shaped how the studio works. And I've said this earlier in our discussion, that the artist is correct. The artist knows what they want. I've had artists come to me and say, 'Hey, I was working with this printmaker, or that printmaker, and they didn't like the color blue I was doing on this print, and they changed it, and I couldn't accept the print.' The artist is correct. They know what they're doing. And if you can get yourself out of the way, and let your skills as a printmaker come through, you'll be successful. It's when you try to start imposing your aesthetic and your judgment on somebody else's artwork that it becomes a problem for you. The other piece of advice I got was from another printer, he said, 'The artist and the publishers don't want to hear how hard it's going to be to do the print, they just want to know that you can do it.'

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah.

Bob Blanton  And you know, they tell you, 'Oh, I want to do this this way, I want to get this effect and this effect and this effect,' you go, 'Oh sure, we can do that, no problem.' And then after they leave, you may be banging your head against the wall to try to figure out how to do it. But that's not their problem, that's your problem. Their problem is to make the piece of artwork as beautiful as they can, and the publisher has to pay for it all. And they don't need to know how hard it is. You can charge them for it. But you don't need to explain it to them or complain to them like, 'You're making my life too hard.'

Miranda Metcalf  I love that. I almost feel like that's almost good life advice. Like, it can be translated to so many other parts of human interaction as well.

Bob Blanton  Oh, yeah. So those two things. The artist knows what they're doing, and just stay out of their way. Let them have as much freedom as they can have.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, that's really wonderful. So I know you've got an exhibition on right now at Pace, which I'm sure is really nice, but anything else that's kind of making the future seem bright at the moment?

Bob Blanton  One of the things that I'm doing, being a business for 40 years has made me feel extremely lucky and fortunate. There's not many other print shops, independent print shops like me, that can say they've been in business that long and been successful and had the quality of the artists come through that we have. And so part of my celebration for the 40 years is, I've put together a portfolio of eight artists that we're going to donate all the funds to arts education once it sells. And so in preparation for that, I've set up the Brand X Foundation, all the proceeds will be going into that, and then it will become used in the philanthropic way. And Brand X will keep going, and Brand X Foundation I think will be the next step.

Miranda Metcalf  That's amazing. Oh, I love that. When you were saying that Brand X has been around for 40 years, and it's an incredible accomplishment, I was wondering if you could kind of point to why you think Brand X has been so successful or why you think it's made it 40 years, if there's a key to that, or any thoughts you have on why you've gotten to have these successful decades that you have had?

Bob Blanton  Well, my wife said, 'Don't forget to talk about your persistence.' I've gone through recession after recession, things go up and things go down, I've had to move the studio, we're in our fourth space. And I've always tried to just make sure that the quality of the studio stays up, is not compromised at all. And by concentrating on my craft, and the quality, I feel that that keeps having quality work coming in. I'm a business, and I have to worry about money all the time. But that is not the major pursuit of the business. If an artist is doing - okay, we've priced a print to be a 15 color print. And the artist is not happy with 15 colors, and wants to add another 15 colors to make it a 30 color print, which makes it a whole lot more expensive, you know, costly on my side to do it. There's never been this extreme situation, right, but this is indicative of what... let's say he wants another five or seven colors on it. And the publisher will not be willing to pay for that. Well, I just tell the artist, 'Let's do it,' because that's the important thing. And I've strived to make the artists happy all the time. And as long as the artists are happy, they'll keep coming back. Alex Katz has been happy with me for 20 some years. And he's working with Robert Lococo out of St. Louis. And when Robert wanted to do prints with him, Alex told him, 'I want to use Brand X.' And Robert and I had never worked together before. And Robert said, 'Okay, you know, let's use Brand X.' The artist insisted on it. And a lot of artists through the years have done that, said, 'We're going to work with Brand X to do this.' And you keep the artist happy. It seems to me like the the moral aesthetic thing to do is make sure that their art is done properly if you're gonna get into it. If you're not going to do the best job possible, regardless of whether you're getting paid for it or not, then you shouldn't be in the business. I've done so many jobs where I go, 'Wow. I really mispriced that job.' And you do a job that you mispriced, and you're losing money on it, are you going to do it badly? Are you going to cut corners to do it badly so that not only do you lose money on it, but you lose your reputation as a good printer? You get hurt two times instead of just losing money. And so I've always tried to maintain that we got to do good work, and we'll worry about the money later.

Miranda Metcalf  I'm so glad I asked. That's such a great answer. So thank you. 

Bob Blanton  You're welcome. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, and thank you so much for having this chat with me. It's been really, really wonderful and thrilling to listen to you talk about the experiences you've had, and I really appreciate it.

Bob Blanton  Well, you're very welcome. And thank you for taking the time to do this interview.

Miranda Metcalf  It's been a great chat. I'm really looking forward to having the honor of sharing it with listeners and writing a little piece about you, and I really appreciate it. So thank you very much, Bob.

Bob Blanton  Well, thank you too. Thank you, Miranda. I really appreciate it too.

Miranda Metcalf  Definitely. I'll be in touch.

Bob Blanton  Okay, you take care. Thank you. Bye bye.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again in two weeks' time when my guest will be Rona Green. Rona is an Australian artist who makes hand-colored linocuts. Compositions feature half human, half animal creations, which explore the nature of identity. We'll talk printmaking, boxing, tattoos, and Egyptian art. This episode, like all episodes, was written and produced by me, Miranda Metcalf, with editing help from Timothy Pauszek and music by Joshua Webber. I'll see you in two weeks.