ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Look hard at a place that was built on a human scale and has known a lot of use, and it begins to suggest stories of the people who've put their hands to it. I like to find an interplay between the original design of a place and how it's been lived in and changed over time. Windows and porches—public edges of private lives—are the subjects I return to most often. I take photographs for reference, and then in the studio try to recreate how the light hit, how the air felt, at the moment I was there.
I print all my own editions. (There's no real choice: it is only during the printing that the images evolve.) Using hand-painted and hand-drawn stencils, I build up many layers of varyingly transparent ink. Most layers are themselves blends of colors fading into each other. It usually takes me 50-100 pulls (separate printings onto each copy) to bring a full-size silkscreen print to satisfactory completion.
STEPS OF SILKSCREENING by Nancy McIntyre
My silkscreens are made up of many layers of mostly transparent colors. I paint a stencil onto a wood-framed fabric screen for each color, to block the color from printing where it doesn’t belong. Then I print each layer by pressing thick ink through the screen onto paper using a squeegee.
To make an edition of prints, I first draw or paint a full-scale “master drawing,” and plan what color or colors to use in each spot.
Tracing from the master drawing directly onto the screen fabric, I begin to make my painted-blockout stencils. The screens are reusable; after printing a color, I dissolve the stencil and paint a new one. Often, my stencils include drawing and resist techniques as well as painting.
To print an edition of 50, I start with about 100 sheets of paper. Roughly half will be lost to mistakes or used up in seeking the right color and transparency for each of many (30–130) layers of ink.
I print the first color onto all 100 sheets of paper, then print the second color, and so on. To make sure that the stencils line up with each other, I use “three-point registration” to set down the paper in exactly the same place each time.
I save a “printer’s proof” of how the edition looks after I print the first 5 or 6 colors. Often, a “color” is made up of multiple colors of ink laid side-by-side on the screen and faded together with the squeegee as I print.
I continue to add layers of color, as planned. Every so often I save a pair of printer’s proofs: one showing, on a fresh piece of paper, what colors I have added since the last stage, and a second showing what the print looks like with the new additions.
By the time I have carried out my original plan of colors, the print is usually only about half done. The scene still looks uninviting, not the compelling image I’d hoped to create out of my initial color study, reference photos and memories of a place that had transfixed me as I passed it by.
I sketch on one of the half-finished prints with pastel or acrylic, planning more layers, trying to figure what I need to do to add depth and liven things up. I print more colors and reassess again. The print as it evolves gives me new ideas of where it should go, beyond what I had first envisioned. That’s what keeps the process interesting.
