episode twenty-three | steve campbell

Published 18 September 2019

Miranda Metcalf  Hello print friends, and welcome to the 23rd 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'm going to keep this intro real quick so we can get to the good stuff as fast as possible this week. First and foremost, thank you so very, very much to the Patreon supporters who make Pine Copper Lime (Hello, Print Friend) possible. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to those of you who've been there from the beginning, helping keeping the good vibes flowing. And thank you from the bottom of my soul to those of you who joined up last week. You know who you are. And I hope that you know that you are personally responsible for me screaming with joy at the notification on my phone. Sometimes in public. At least once at the Sydney Contemporary art fair that I was working at this last weekend. It's fine. Security very quickly realized that nothing actually wrong was happening. Other than that, I've just got to say, Pine Copper Lime's Instagram (@helloprintfriend) is almost at 18,000 followers, which means that that big 2-0 is right around the corner, which means there are gonna be some big, big giveaways. So make sure you're following me there. The Pine Copper Lime newsletter goes out once a month with printmaking news from around the web, and the Pine Copper Lime print gallery features printmakers from Australia and Southeast Asia doing amazing things you won't find anywhere else. Of course, all of that is in the show notes. Please do take a look. I love you all, your support is amazing. Let's see. Is there anything else? Of course! Printmaking forever, shun the non believers, join the party. My guest this week is Steve Campbell of Landfall Press. For those of you not familiar already with this iconic print studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they're about to celebrate their 50th anniversary next year, and Steve has been there for 31 of those 50 years. The founder, Jack Lemon, has been there for all 50, and at 83, you'll still find him hauling around litho stones and collaborating with visiting artists. Landfall has published editions with Judy Chicago, Christo, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Kara Walker, just to name a few. So while it was an honor to talk with someone with such a rich connection to collaborative printmaking, that's not what made this interview so special to me. As you'll soon find out, Steve talks about printmaking in this incredible way. The love he has for the craft is palpable, and he's not afraid to get philosophical about the nature of the practice, which, if you haven't noticed already, is just about my favorite thing in the entire world. So sit back, relax, and prepare to get metaphysical with Steve Campbell. Hi, Steven, how's it going?

Steve Campbell  It's going well, how are you? 

Miranda Metcalf  I'm really good. Thanks for joining me. I'm sure you all are busy at Landfall.

Steve Campbell  We do have an artist in right now, but she's working away in the other room, so I could slip away for a moment or two.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, great. I will take those moments. Thank you. So I was hoping that you could just give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are. I'm sure most all of our listeners will know Landfall Press. But for the folks listening at home, do the who you are, where you are what you do questions.

Steve Campbell  All right. Well, my name is Steve Campbell. I am the Director, that's my official title, of Landfall Press. Although I do collaboration, printing, sales, whatever happens to come my way. Everybody here wear several hats. We're in Santa Fe, New Mexico, been here for the last 14 years now, and we publish fine art prints.

Miranda Metcalf  And how long have you been at Landfall? 

Steve Campbell  I've been at Landfall for 31 years. 

Miranda Metcalf  And how long has Landfall been around?

Steve Campbell  in 2020, it'll be our 50th year. 

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, congrats. 

Steve Campbell  It's kind of an exciting time. We're going to have a 50th Anniversary show at the Milwaukee Art Museum in October, and that'll move to I believe Knoxville Art Museum, and then there's probably a couple other museums on the venue also. So it's going to be a nice traveling show.

Miranda Metcalf  That's great. And is that just going to be a retrospective of some of the work that you all have done in the last 50 years?

Steve Campbell  Yep. It is going to come out in conjunction with a book, a 50th anniversary book, "Landfall, Five Decades." The book is going to be terrific. It's one of those kind of coffee table size things. And I've got to see, what would you call it? The rushes, the proofs of it. And it's an amazing thing to look at.

Miranda Metcalf  That is so exciting. I will definitely look at getting my hands on a copy when those become available, for sure.

Steve Campbell  Yeah, I think you should. I mean, it's going to be done in a different format. When we started working on the book, Jack and I were looking at other books, and we found that they were a little dry. We didn't want, you know, "In 1970, Jack Lemon..." this type of thing. So it's all interviews. Jack and the author just sat down and talked. So you'll get a lot of personal stories, a lot of anecdotes. It should be highly readable.

Miranda Metcalf  That's great. And lots of wonderful photos, I'm assuming.

Steve Campbell  The archive of photos is amazing. And it's put together in a really engaging way.

Miranda Metcalf  So how did you come to printmaking?

Steve Campbell  How I came to it was, I grew up in Cupertino, California before Apple arrived there. And when I left high school, I just went to the community college and took a litho class. And it was so back asswards, or ass backwards, however you want to say it. And I kept thinking, this could not be right. The instructor was a wonderful man, great painter, but the printmaking end of it was a little skewed. So I started researching and trying to figure out just where we were going wrong. He was very fond in lithography of the 50 drop etch on everything. That stone would just sizzle. And I was going, 'This can't be right.' So then I started looking around, finished my little tenure at the community college, and went to Cal State Hayward. And they had just some of the Bay Area greats. Misch Kohn and Kenji Nanao both taught there. The faculty was fabulous. Mel Ramos, Ray Saunders... best place I could possibly land. And when I got there, I met with Kenji and told him my interests and he says, 'Okay, you come here, finish your two years, but stay four.' I think I stayed like six and then moved to Chicago to get my master's degree.

Miranda Metcalf  Okay. And was that in printmaking?

Steve Campbell  It was. It's a silly thing, I think since 1974 or '75, I have not been more than an arm's length away from a press. And after grad school, I taught a year at the Art Institute, just as an adjunct, and then Jack scooped me up when I was teaching part time over at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And I've been here ever since.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, so I'd love to hear that - you say he just sort of scooped you up, but how did that actually happen? What was going on with Landfall that he needed to bring you on at the time? As we touched on before, Landfall was in Chicago at the time. So I'd just love to hear about that time and how that transition actually came to be.

Steve Campbell  You know, when I got out of grad school... It's kind of a funny story. Jack is amazing guy, right? Very driven, ex-Marine, and very straightforward. So when I got out of grad school, I worked there for one year, at first. And I thought, 'Oh, I'm gonna go to a pro shop.' And I went in with my portfolio, which he was totally uninterested in. He has this criteria for hiring press assistants, which I still love. I was telling somebody about it today, which is, he looks for somebody with big arms and a small head. So I go in, tried to show him the portfolio, we talk a little bit and I'm going, this isn't going well. You know, I'm not getting a warm feeling. And he looks at me as I'm packing everything up. And he says, 'I suppose you you heard I'm kind of an asshole.' And I said, 'Yeah, but I came anyway.' And he hired me right then. He said, 'Okay, start work tomorrow.' So I was like, 'Okay.' So I worked there for about a year, and then I got a job teaching over at UIC, and then Jack got a job teaching at UIC. I was trained as a lithographer. And - oh, god, how did this happen? - he was running through etchers over there and couldn't find anybody that he liked. And we were working at UIC together. And I was teaching the etching class, but I was staying like two steps ahead of the students. And he called me up, and he says, 'I want you to come and print the etchings.' I says, 'Well, Jack, I'm not a trained etcher.' And he says, 'Yeah, but you're better than anybody else that's been through here lately.' So I came in, took over the etching spot, and was kind of anchored in there for years. And then we had this really great printer come in from Iowa named Tom Reed, he's at Island Press in St. Louis right now. So he comes in, and I checked him out on the etching press. Great hands, great printer. And then I bolted over to lithography and kind of stayed there ever since. I'll go back to etching if I'm needed, but it's not my first love. I like it, believe me, but I'd rather be over on the litho side.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, what is it about litho that makes it your first love and kind of where you like to be?

Steve Campbell  It's interesting, Jack and the instructor I learned from, Kenji Nanao in California, were both at Tamarind around the same time, back in the '60s. And they were like, to me, they're two sides of the same coin. What I like about it, Kenji sort of taught the kind of spiritual method, right? It's like a choreographed dance, you know, from the roller to the press, and everything runs smoothly. Jack's the same way. So when you're printing, and it's all going right, it's like doing Tai Chi, I suppose. You know, everything has a movement, there's an economy of movement. There's floating of sheets of paper. It's transcendent, I guess. You can get lost in what you're doing. That's what I like about it. It's like dancing. And if you've got a good assistant, and you're on the same wavelength, it can be a really pretty great day. But on the other hand, if it's going to hell, it can really go bad. And you can just sit over there and sweat bullets. I had this, I was printing - of course, you're familiar with Christo - and I was printing a Christo print and something was just off. I wasn't getting what I wanted off of the prints. And Jack came walking by, and I said, 'Jack, come over and confer with me for a little bit. And I want you to look at this stone and look at the print.' So he looks at the stone. I'm explaining what I'm not liking. He looks at the print, he looks at the stone, he looks at me, and he says, 'You're not listening to the stone.' And he turned around, walked away. And I was like, 'That sounded more like Kenji than it did Jack,' right? He got very Zen on me all of a sudden, but I just stepped back and then made a few adjustments and was quite happy. It was the weirdest thing to say to somebody. But you know, it worked out real well. And I remembered it. I wait for opportunities to tell that to other people.

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, I bet. It's so good, though. 

Steve Campbell  You're just not listening to the stone. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Well, I think, talking to quite a few lithographers so far on the podcast, or even just anecdotally in the shop, it's interesting when they can sometimes talk about the stone as if the stone is really another collaborator in the whole thing. You know, it's like me, my assistant printer, the artist I'm doing the collaborative printing with, and then the stone.

Steve Campbell  I think you're absolutely right. We're getting to sound metaphysical, but it's okay. I mean, each of the stones have a different characteristic and a different personality. You're right there. Paper's the same way, too. It's kind of a breathing thing. If you have one humid day, it'll give you problems the next day when it dries out. Registration changes. And down here in the southwest, it is so dry that if you have a humid day, it'll throw everything off. Not a lot, but just enough to be an annoyance. But I would agree with everybody you've talked to, everything's got a character to it, and you just have to listen to it.

Miranda Metcalf  And I even had, I think it might have been Elizabeth Jean Younce, we had a conversation last week and I think she might have even said, 'Look, the limestone, it's made out of things that used to be living.'

Steve Campbell  That's a good point. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, you know, it's skeletal fragments and things from the ocean, like marine organisms, and maybe part of that personality has to do with the fact that it was once alive. 

Steve Campbell  This comes back to another thing. We're talking about lithography, and I know for both Jack and I, one of the pleasures of it is that it engages all your senses. Graining the stone, the touch, the feel, the sound, even the smell of everything. So you are... it's a state of high awareness, everything you're doing. And that's another attraction about the whole thing. And years ago, Kenji had talked about a correlation between printing and meditation, where you are repeating the same motions over and over again, and you do kind of get to an altered state when it's going well. It's a different kind of altered state if it's not, but we try to avoid that part.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, I think that there is an anecdote about the Buddha, where somebody comes to him and says, 'We have this woman and she works on a farm. And how can she possibly gain enlightenment? She doesn't read, she can't study, how will she ever do that?' And the Buddha just said, 'All she needs to do is when she's washing her rice, always just be washing her rice. Just be present with washing her rice. And that is the path to enlightenment.' And maybe there's something, a similar correlation with being present with that kind of repetitive work, that it's getting that meditative state.

Steve Campbell  I think it's a great analogy. It works for me. Can I use that?

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah! Yeah, go for it. Yeah. And so you were in Chicago for a while, and then at what point did you and Jack move Landfall down to Santa Fe?

Steve Campbell  Oh, god, I was in Chicago for 22 years. And I meant to be there for two years. And I started at the shop. And it's one thing, you know, a shop like this, it's not hard to go to work, because you're always engaged with doing something or problem solving. Or you'll take it home with you, which I'm sure most people don't want to take their job home, but a lot of times in the middle of the night, you'll sit up and go, 'Aha! This is the answer!' So 22 years later, 14 years ago, we moved out here. And Jack had bought some property out here in Santa Fe, and him and his significant other, Jeanette, they'd come out here and spend a couple weeks, and then they'd come out here and spend three weeks, and then it was a month. And then it was the whole summer. So he was spending more and more time out here. And I'm from the west, like I said, I'm a native Californian, but my family are all kind of Utah, Oregon, desert people. Which kind of sounds like hill people. No offense to any hill people. But there was a correlation. So we were printing in Chicago, and I knew he wanted to get out. And we're talking to each other over the press, and I don't even think he finished his sentence. He says, 'Hey, if I wanted to move the shop to Santa Fe, would you -' and I said, 'Oh, yeah, I'm there. I'll go.' And it's been great. I love it out here.

Miranda Metcalf  Good. What was the transition like? Was it like a big jump to kind of go from the big city, that kind of arts hub, to... obviously Santa Fe is still an arts hub, but it's got to have a very different feel to it.

Steve Campbell  I transitioned really well. I like going to Chicago. I like visiting Chicago. I didn't like living in Chicago, though. And I'm sure there's a bunch of Chicagoans that are going, 'Ah, Steve,' but it just wasn't for me. You know, I've got friends that still love it. It just, there was nothing for my eye to settle on that wasn't man-made. And that's why, for me, it was a beautiful transition.

Miranda Metcalf  What does Landfall look like now? How many people work there? How many editions are you printing a year? What's the current state of Landfall?

Steve Campbell  We both agree this is probably the best incarnation of the shop yet. We were at another spot when we first moved here, and then as we were talking, the area became popular and we were forced to relocate. But we have about 5000 square feet. Jack, the owner, and myself, we're the two principal printers. I have another guy named Josh, he came up from Tamarind. And he's quite good, and he also prints with us too. So there's three printers, and then my wife Chris runs the front. Thank god. She's the only one of us that can add and actually sounds pleasant on the phone. The rest of us are kind of like, pick up the phone to say, 'Leave a message or leave me alone.'

Miranda Metcalf  I'd love to hear a little bit more about how it came to be and how you and Jack were building up Landfall to become what it is, and to be in a point where you've printed for incredible artists over the years and really become so established. How does that go from idea to reality?

Steve Campbell  You got to just hand it to Jack, primarily. It's always been his mission. I've sort of worked my way up through kind of being the last man standing continually, so people will leave and I just won't leave. But Jack is the moving force here. He's the guy that picks the artists, gets them in. I do a lot of the collaboration. Jack does too. But he's remarkable on the choices. I think we did the first Christo print here in 1970. Or in Chicago. Or at Landfall, even better. You know, Jim Dine, of course, Claes Oldenburg. That was pretty great. I got to do that collaboration. I was so excited. And I think the funny thing on it was, he's a real perfectionist, right. And he's into the minutiae of this. So you know, we got all the matrixes made, and I proofed these things, and I would send him a print, and I'd come home and I'd look at Chris, and I said, 'Yeah, Claes Oldenburg called me today, and we had a great conversation,' and I'm feeling pretty cocky about the whole thing. And then I had to reproof and reproof. It was a great print. And it was a great experience. So the Milwaukee Art Museum holds our archive. What the archive does contain is all the information from every print, from notes to preliminary drawings to proofs that are not realized. And it's pretty marvelous. Claes sent me a letter that I wanted to keep so bad, but it went into the archives. So I get this letter. I open it up. And when I unfold the paper, it's a piece of eight inch graph paper, right. And four of the grids in the center are colored in green. And there's a circle on it, and it says, 'Try this color, Steve. Claes.' And that was all that was on it. And it was beautiful. It was so minimal. I was going, 'I want this.' But you can see it at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Maybe for people listening who aren't super familiar with that idea of a shop and its archive, would you maybe speak to that relationship a little bit and sort of how that formed, and then what technically that that looks like, between Landfall and the Milwaukee Art Museum?

Steve Campbell  Well, you'll find a lot of shops that have been around for a long time and have a long history. Like I said, all the archival material is saved and it is stored and it is cataloged. Because it's an important part of your history. I think, oh, several shops, Lawrence Lithography, I think their archive went to the Spencer. The Art Institute in Chicago, I can't remember if they have Gemini or ULAE, but they have a shop archive also. Museums acquire them, and they go into their print study rooms, and it becomes invaluable as a teaching tool. At the Art Institute, students can go in and access all this, and they can see the process of how the print is created and made, from a preliminary drawing to proofs. And we do that at the shop. We proof everything several times, different colors, until something resonates. So you can see all the different versions that the proofs go through before you come up with the final BAT or RTP or whatever you want to call it. And then that is, a lot of time, included in the archive also. So you can see the entire process. And I think, as a teaching tool, it's invaluable.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And so that's an active ongoing relationship, too. So it sounds like you continue to send them editions and any kind of documentation that's significant around it, yeah?

Steve Campbell  It depends on the agreement with the institution. Milwaukee, I think, got our first 30 years, and that's all the contract was for. So we're sitting on another 20 years of archive material right now. So they might pick it up, they might not. Hopefully they will. I think it should all go to one place... Can you hear me, Milwaukee?

Miranda Metcalf  You know, when you talk about these shops that have been around for a long time, like you guys, like Lawrence Lithography Studio, like Gemini, I think a lot of times people really understand that tradition maybe more in the 20th century. Like these really big name artists who are doing sometimes large scale sculpture work, but then coming to a print shop to collaborate and do works on paper. And I'm wondering if, in your experience, or your estimation of what things are like now, if that tradition is still alive and well? And I feel like it is, from my point of view, but I think sometimes people from the outside of print shops looking in think of that more as 20th century, I guess.

Steve Campbell  I don't think it's quite the same anymore. It used to be, private shops, print shops, you would have a stable of artists that you worked with, that came to you. Like you were talking about, you'd get sculptors and painters, and it's very seldom that you'd ever get a printmaker in the shop. But it is a little different nowadays. I don't think it quite has the same cachet, that you can ask an artist in, and they'll go, 'Well, I don't know if I have time, let me check my schedule.' Instead of hanging up the phone and having them at the door almost immediately. It's a little different, in my estimation. And it's a little sad, too. Because we love making prints. And I think the digital world has kind of hurt us a little bit on that. Chris always - she's the vice president of the shop - she always refers to printmaking as the "redheaded stepchild" of the medium.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. Do you think that maybe a little bit of that sort of transition, do you think that comes from the digital world or lack of education? So even when the contemporary artists now, when they've come up and they've gone through art school, they don't get the have that falling in love with the medium and excitement to return to it? Or where do you think it comes from?

Steve Campbell  No, I think that's definitely an element. Part of it's technology, part of it's education. You don't see it anymore. And everybody can just go to the Epson and make a print. I mean, we've used the digital elements in print. And I'm all for having those tools, but then we always print on top of them afterwards. Kind of a hybrid. But we've never just turned out a giclee.

Miranda Metcalf  Right. Please don't.

Steve Campbell  Sounds like a dirty word, doesn't it?

Miranda Metcalf  It does, it does! I feel like it is.

Steve Campbell  Yeah, but I pronounced it with a little elan.

Miranda Metcalf  Right, if it's French, it has to be classy.

Steve Campbell  Absolutely. Oh, speaking of classy French things, did you look at the website at all? 

Miranda Metcalf  Uh-huh, yeah.

Steve Campbell  Did you see our old French press?

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, yeah, I think so.

Steve Campbell  It dates from 1870. It was originally steam powered. It's a fabulous machine. They still use them in Europe all the time, but I don't know if... I think we've got the only one operating in the states right now. And its pedigree - supposedly, but you know, I don't have any, we'll go French again, provenance on this - it printed both Lautrec and Picasso. At least that's what I've heard.

Miranda Metcalf  Oh my goodness. And you said it used to be steam powered?

Steve Campbell  Yeah. It's converted to electric right now. But it's quite a quite a gadget. There's a YouTube video with our machine on it. But once we got that out, there's a print shop in - you know Idem in Paris? Well, they put one out that David Lynch produced. And it makes ours look a little sad at this juncture. It's not David Lynch, but it's still kind of fun, and you can see the crew working with it.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, well, I'll definitely find it a link to it online and I'll put it in the notes for the show. So David Lynch or not, people can see the one that's in America doing its good work.

Steve Campbell  Yeah, the David Lynch one is pretty good, though. It's worth looking at, too.

Miranda Metcalf  I guess. If you're into that kind of thing. 

Steve Campbell  I mean, it is David Lynch.

Miranda Metcalf  It's actually just filmed upside down with a completely red filter over it. 

Steve Campbell  It could be. And backwards. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Steve Campbell  But it came out after we did. I don't know if they saw our piece or David Lynch went, 'You know what would be a good idea?'

Miranda Metcalf  Hasn't David Lynch made some prints? He's a printmaker!

Steve Campbell  Oh, yeah. He has made prints with - well, here's a good point. I don't view Lynch as a printmaker. He's an artist who makes prints, right?

Miranda Metcalf  Right. Good distinction.

Steve Campbell  There's like a bizarre hierarchy that you still have to wrap your head around. So I think he goes to Idem - which I'm probably pronouncing wrong, but I'm trying to give it a little French flare - and he's done some stuff at Tandem. Those are the two I can think of. But the piece he was doing in Paris there, for the film, was really pretty fabulous. So you're looking at it and going, 'Oh, that's nice. I love it.' And that shop is amazing. But so is ours. I'm on this podcast to toot our horn, not theirs. But when we were talking about this, you have artists that make prints, you have printmakers, you have printers, and there is kind of a schism between each one. Have you run into this at all? I'd love your take on this. We've gone to places - we used to take interns from different schools. And we'd have them spend the summer with us. And the idea was to teach them different methods to make better their own personal practice, right? And I found that we were meeting some resistance wherever we went, where people were going in printmakers - and you might want to edit all this out. See how it sounds. Because it might be my own personal thing that I thought we were meeting resistance. You know, people would say, 'Oh, that's all fine. But you don't want to be a printer.' Which, of course, I found a little offensive. I said, 'What's wrong with them?' But have you seen this at all, this kind of division, even within the print medium?

Miranda Metcalf  And so do you mean like people who are printmakers, and then people who are just collaborative printers? 

Steve Campbell  Yes.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Mm-hmm. 

Steve Campbell  Oh, you have? 

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, yeah, yeah. And what's interesting is that I find that there are definitely a couple of schools of thought on it. There's one camp that sort of says, to be a collaborative printer, you don't necessarily need your own art practice, because what you're doing is an art in and of itself. And you don't need this separate idea of like, unless you're making something on paper that's only your ideas, you're not an artist. Which is kind of silly to me, because I think that what collaborative printmakers do is art. And it takes all of the same sets of skills of creative thinking and bravery and problem solving as any art practice. 

Steve Campbell  I couldn't agree more. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. And then there's some people, though, that seem to think that you can't be a collaborative printer unless you're a quote-unquote "individual artist," which I don't agree with.

Steve Campbell  It was odd, because I never had - way back in the '70s, back in the last century, is what we're talking about - there wasn't that schism at all. It was fine to be a printmaker, but we all had aspirations to be printers. And somewhere there was a shift in all that, where it was fine to be a printmaker, but to be a printer was somehow just being a mere craftsman. Which, when I first encountered it, I was like, 'Wait, wait, wait, wait, that doesn't sound right.' So it would be nobler to work at the hardware store and then make prints in your basement than it would be to be a collaborative printer and make your own prints also? And I really don't see the distinction. You know, they're both fine. And they're both jobs. But I don't know, you'll probably get a lot of comments on that one. So be it, that's fine, too. We can open up the discussion.

Miranda Metcalf  Let's do it. Because I think it is an important thing to address. And I think of two things when I think about it, and one is that it goes back to that artificial hierarchy between art and craft, just in general, that exists. That it's completely made up. And that the whole world is set up to create hierarchies, because people profit from them. And so you can charge more for a woodcut that's on a piece of paper than if it's on a T shirt, even though it's the exact same woodcut, you know, this kind of idea of hierarchies. So there's that idea of craft versus art, which is just arbitrary. And then also, I wonder if it does come from just a little bit of the breakdown in the education, like we were talking about earlier, of the tradition of the collaborative printer. And when you look back and you see, like you said, Picasso, it was a time that was like, if you were a practicing artist of some repute, you were making collaborative prints. It just happened.

Steve Campbell  Absolutely. It wasn't thought of as coming down. Making prints was as an high art form as anything else you could possibly do. I don't get it. Back when I was coming up, not only - and I've forgotten a lot - but not only did you know the print, but a lot of the times you knew the printer also. Jack introduced me to Picasso's printer, the guy that printed his etchings, and - what's his name? Aldo Crommelynck, I think - and I just became speechless. I felt just starstruck, kind of kicking your feet, and you make eye contact and get like, 'Well, shucks.' Felt like such an idiot. You get Christo in here, and you don't think twice about it, or Bob Cottingham. But yet you meet this renowned printer and I become tongue tied. And you've noticed, I don't have problems talking, usually, and all of the sudden I got so shy. Much to everybody's amusement, I'm sure.

Miranda Metcalf  I'm sure. Even in the way that you see work credited in art galleries and museums, you will walk into a museum and you maybe weren't expecting to see prints, you're just going there for an exhibition. And then you see a print. And you see the way it's framed, and they've completely cut out the chop. And you're looking at this, and you're like, I know this person isn't a printmaker, like, I know they didn't do this four color lithograph themselves. And yet, there's no credit given on the wall tag for the shop, let alone the printer. And that's not helping.

Steve Campbell  Some museums will.

Miranda Metcalf  Some will. Some will.

Steve Campbell  No, I agree. You know, we've been cut out of monographs entirely. There'll be prints that we've done, and they'll say, oh, this was gifted to the museum by so-and-so. But we'll be cut out of the equation. It happens, and it always hurts a little. But a good museum will credit the shop. Some of the best books I've seen not only credit the shop, but they'll say who printed it and when. And that's exciting little backstory stuff. It's not so much an ego boost, because I'm not saying I want to see my name or Jack's name or any of our friends' names in particular. But it's interesting. That's what I loved about the Art Institute in Chicago, the print study room. There is, not only could you find a Manet print, but you can find who printed that print, and you get a little more into the wonkiness of it all. And I love that word, too. The kid we have - he's not a kid, he's 25, so maybe looks like a kid to me, because I'm not - he's a wonk. You know the term, right?Print wonkies? I don't think I do! What's a print wonk? A wonk is, to me - I don't know where I picked that up, it might have been from John Langford, a punk rock guy in Chicago. And a great artist, by the way, too - but a wonk is an enthusiast to the utmost degree. You know, it's like a nerd, but a little more on steroids. He's not a nerd, he's a wonk. Maybe we can get that going. Let's get that into the lexicon. 

Miranda Metcalf  I like it. Print wonk.

Steve Campbell  Josh is a wonk. So it's fun having somebody that's 25 years old across the press from you that can keep up on your conversation. Because you know, Jack's also an old print wonk, and so am I. So if you start talking about this obscure stuff, he knows. So it means that there's hope, that a good job's being done down at Tamarind to educate the kids. Because you're getting these nerdy, wonky kids coming out.

Miranda Metcalf  That's how we like them. 

Steve Campbell  Oh, I like it a lot. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. We've talked a little bit, obviously, about that lack of education and just lack of general understanding, and probably therefore, reverence for collaborative printmaking processes is not as prevalent as it was.

Steve Campbell  It's not. I could get out into the weeds on this, too, where... you're wondering how discreet to be. I think a lot of people listen to you, and I'm a recent convert, also. But I'm not seeing it in the shops anymore. I also do sales for Landfall, which means that if a University has an art museum, I'll go there and try to sell them our editions, but I always go to the print shop afterwards. And some of them are not in the best condition at all, which saddens me. Although, god, where was I? I was up in Lincoln, did the whole sales pitch, right, walked over to the print shop, and it was at the tail end of the class, and it was packed. And it was really kind of exciting to see the energy running through that etching shop. And I went and introduced myself, and I was looking at kids' work. And the plates looked great. The prints were not pulling everything that they could out of the plate. And I just asked her very politely, I said, 'Can I stay for a little while?' You know, I just don't want to go back to the hotel and start drinking. By the way, somebody brought me a bourbon. So I'm back to it. So I stayed for a couple hours and just worked with everybody and talked with everybody. And I had a marvelous time. But so often, there's not that level of energy in the shops, and not that level of education. And I don't know where that's coming from. There's not the excitement that was in the Bay Area in the '70s, or some of these other areas. It was Iowa, where my friend Tom Reed, who I'd mentioned earlier, was out of, they had a very exciting printmaking department. It was renowned, back in the old days. But I don't know, other than Knoxville and Beauvais Lyons, I don't know where the energy's at anymore. Maybe you would know. But back when I was coming up, it was Iowa. Stanford and Nathan Oliveira was huge. He was a marvelous influence on the printmaking community. But I am a bit out of the loop. I just don't see that kind of energy anymore. And I think that addresses what you were talking about, right? So obviously, you've seen a shift. And I just waved my finger at nothing in the air. You've seen this, I'm wagging a finger. This is important.

Miranda Metcalf  So a couple of things come to mind, and one is that I see the energy and the excitement about printmaking a lot in the digital sphere. There are printmakers that have 300,000 followers on Instagram. That's incredible. And there are people really connecting that way. So I think that that's significant, and in a way, will be printmaking's savior. And I say that because when you sort of say you go to these universities, and you're wondering where the excitement is, I think that it doesn't come from the students, the kind of lack of engagement, because any well-funded print shop I've ever seen has the energy in it. I think it's the administration, and that it's in sort of a cycle where the people in the administration want to make cuts, they want to not fund things, and they don't understand what printmaking really is. So they look to do that. And they look to make cuts in the arts first, of course, most in any situation. 

Steve Campbell  Yeah, absolutely. 

Miranda Metcalf  And printmaking, I think, suffers quicker and more significantly from the cuts. And I'm sure that - speaking of controversial statements - I'm sure that I'll be getting letters from painting departments around the world for that. But really, I think because it's so community based, because it's so shop based, because you have to have that press, and you have to have a technician who can fix that press when it breaks down to make these things work, it's like, this hurts us, and therefore, it's not there.

Steve Campbell  Alright, I can talk to this. When you finish your sentence. I didn't mean to interrupt. 

Miranda Metcalf  Oh, yeah, no, no. I think you get where I'm going with it, which is just, I think it's administrative cuts within larger university systems that they go for the arts, and they go for printmaking. And because printmaking is a living, breathing community, in order for it to thrive in a university setting, you pull one of the legs out from that table, and it becomes unstable pretty quickly.

Steve Campbell  I couldn't agree more with that assessment. It's funny, this goes back to me referring to printmaking as the redheaded stepchild. It's usually the first thing that, if cuts happen and cuts come down through the art department, they start looking at print kind of critically, which is sad. But I am going to go back to talking about Cal State Hayward, and my own experience is it was one of the few places that the fused all mediums. Printmaking was as important as sculpture, as important as painting. So there's no hierarchy. And what they always maintained at that time is, we're not training painters, we're not training printmakers, we're training artists. And this is just part of your vocabulary as an artist. You should be able to sculpt, you should be able to paint, you should be able to make a print, and all with ease. Things tend to get a little boxed in, you get labeled. And I think that's been one of the downfalls of all this, and I'd like to see it come back around full circle again.

Miranda Metcalf  Well, I do see incredible excitement, like I said, in the digital sphere, I think that printmaking is exceptionally well-poised to survive art sales transition to the digital world. Because it's graphic, I think it reproduces much better in a photograph than other media. And it also often is on paper, although not always, therefore it makes it easier to ship long distances. So it's got a few physical characteristics that make it, as I said, well-poised to survive galleries moving online, and that sort of thing.

Steve Campbell  Hasn't that always been the allure of prints and collectors, is that it is the most democratic or proletariat of all mediums, is that you can't always afford a painting but you can almost always afford a print. So when you're saying the digital sphere, you're talking about and galleries not being roof and mortar anymore, brick and mortar, but just becoming digital?

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. Or being brick and mortar, but having, say, half of their sales come from online sales.

Steve Campbell  No, that's very true. We don't get a lot of traffic through the shop, but almost everything either comes from me going to a place and showing the prints or online. So it's imperative to have an online presence. I fully agree with that.

Miranda Metcalf  And it also has a performative and dramatic element to it that makes it really, also, I think, well-suited for some sort of digital promotion. It has the two or three seconds of pulling the paper up from the final plate or key stone or whatever you want to call it. And that moment is magic, no matter how many times you've seen it done.

Steve Campbell  I agree. I like the term "the reveal." And even for printers, too, it's great to pull that sheet off of whatever matrix you're using, be it etching or litho, it's always a little giddy thrill. I think one of my bigger downfalls is when we're editioning, and, you know, we're a production shop. So time is money, right? You got to get this thing done. And I'll pull a print off and just tend to kind of linger over it a little bit, going, 'Oh, hey, this is really nice. I didn't notice this over here before.' And then has somebody has to pull me back to reality, like, 'There's still 50 more to do,' you know? 'Oh, yeah. Sorry.'

Miranda Metcalf  I love that. And so I do think there are some... you know, I'm not someone who likes to give energy to the negative. And so I don't - not to say that I think we should ignore some of the institutional support crumbling for printmaking. But I see people so excited for it and so interested in sharing and connecting, and I see qualities that printmaking has that makes it a survivor, and a survivor into the digital age, that I think that may change how it exists in this world, but I also don't see it going away. I think it's just going to shift kind of the place that it has in the world.

Steve Campbell  I fully agree. I mean, it comes and it goes. I mean, the establishment of Tamarind alone, back in the '60s, came from the fact that the art of lithography was dying off. So the idea was to start training people. So things come in waves, it ebbs and it flows. I hate to see it ebbing, because this is my passion, it's what I like, and to see people not being interested in it, or print shops closing down because it's "toxic" - and I just did air quotes. I have a little problem with the whole green thing, but I don't know if we want to go there - but it hurts a little bit to see a decline.

Miranda Metcalf  Part of it is, at least from my experience with it, is that either people don't know what printmaking is, or they love it. And so for me, the frustration comes from, if you could only know what this was, you would love it. Trust me. I promise you. Like, there's no other option.

Steve Campbell  Well, that brings back the vitality of the notion of print study rooms. Which are amazing. I love going to print study rooms and talking to the curators there. Of course, you know who Kara Walker is, right? So we did a lot of prints with her, and we did the silhouettes and everything she's known for. But we were looking at her sketchbooks, phenomenal sketchbooks, you could become lost in these things. And we wanted to kind of show off her drawing skills. And you'll appreciate this. You know, she does that kind of antebellum type of work with slavery as the subject, really powerful stuff. So we spent an afternoon over at the Art Institute in Chicago, and Mark Pascale was kind enough to show us Goya's "Disasters Of War," which she loved, looked at, and then came back and produced I think four or five prints influenced by Goya. And they're amazing. You should look them up and see if you can find them, or you can write Chris and ask her to send you the images. You can see the influence, and yet, she made them uniquely hers simultaneously. Which also has that line of continuity... and that gets back to one of the other things that I really like about making prints, no matter whether you're making an etching or lithograph. An etching, for instance, you have a line of continuity all the way back to Rembrandt. It's done the same exact way. Lithography, you have that line of continuity all the way back to Senefelder. And it's exhilirating to think about it, that this has continued over hundreds of years. It's phenomenal. You can probably tap Chris, if you want to see these Walkers. They're phenomenal.

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah, I definitely will. So kind of talking about the past and the current and all of that sort of thing, I'd love to hear what's on the horizon for Landfall. What projects are coming up that you all are particularly excited about, that people should be on the lookout for, if they want to follow you?

Steve Campbell  Project wise, I have a Korean artist named Jiha Moon in here right now. And she's doing a terrific print. I might even be neglecting her as we talk. She's very patient with me. And Tom Huck is going to be coming in. Ghada Amer will be coming in in the fall. And we're going to do a little Nick Cave print, also. So we have things cooking, and then it'll be a focus on getting the 50th anniversary show up and going and taking everything out there and having that celebration of five decades of the shop, which I'm kind of thrilled about. I was there for the 25th. I've been here forever. I had dark hair when I first started working here. But that's what's on the horizon. That's what we're working towards.

Miranda Metcalf  I love it. And where's the best way people can learn about the projects and follow them? Newsletter, website, Instagram, any of that?

Steve Campbell  Website is the best hit. Which is landfallpress.com. And I think that's the best way to contact us. None of us are, you know, we're still firmly entrenched in the 20th century. Some of us back to the 14th century. We try to keep up with the whole digital stuff, but I end up scratching my head. One of the jokes around here is you have all these printers here, but none of us can use a printer in the office without asking for help. But you can find us online. You can always drop us a line, that's info@landfallpress.com. We'll try to get around to answering you. I think Chris is the only one that actually knows how to type. And if you're in Santa Fe, you can always drop by.

Miranda Metcalf  Yes. I really hope to visit sometime in the next year or so. Because I've got dear friends in Santa Fe.

Steve Campbell  Oh, you definitely have to come by. 

Miranda Metcalf  Yeah. I would love it. It was an absolute pleasure talking to you, Steve, thank you so much.

Steve Campbell  And a pleasure talking to you, and I hope you get something good out of this. 

Miranda Metcalf  I know I do. I was really excited when we were recording. I was like, 'It's so good!' So have a great afternoon printing, and I hope we can talk again sometime in the future. 

Steve Campbell  Oh, I would love that. Okay, well, thank you, too. 

Miranda Metcalf  Thank you, Steve. Have a good night. Well, that's our show for this week. Join me again in two weeks' time when my guest will be Jill Graham, a fine art collaborative printmaker, Tamarind master printer, and a tech at the NSCAD lithography workshop in Halifax, Nova Scotia. We do a deep dive on collaborative printmaking, having an artistic career while being a mom, and working with the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Op at Kinngait Studios in West Dorset. She's a delight, you're gonna love it, join me then. And then I promise that's my last lithographer for a while. I know there's other media, but you know, you marry a lithographer, you just end up talking about lithography a lot.