Studio Leaving Its Print : Since the Early ‘70s, Jack Duganne’s Workshop i.e. in Santa Monica Has Made a Lasting Impression as an Urban Artists Colony

Few streets have changed as much over the past decade as Main Street in the Ocean Park area of Santa Monica. One storefront after another has turned into an expensive restaurant or gallery. Locals grumble that they would trade a dozen fashion boutiques for a single hardware store.

But one old, warehouse-sized building on Main Street remains the same. It has a heavy, wooden sliding door. Stenciled on the only window are the words “Jack Duganne’s Workshop i.e.”

Inside the one-time sheet metal shop is a studio founded on Duganne’s vision of an urban artists’ colony, one where the latest in printmaking and photographic equipment would be available to artists, no matter how slim their pocketbooks.

Although the workshop has wandered from its beginnings, it remains remarkable for its longevity.

“There has been a prodigious output of good work from the studio,” said William Hill, an art instructor at nearby Santa Monica College who has watched the workshop evolve. Begun 20 years ago, it had brief stays at two other Westside locations before settling on Main Street in the early 1970s.

Duganne, 46, said he put “i.e.” into the name because he wanted the workshop’s future to be open-ended. He remembers when he and others would sit in the doorway and watch the sun go down. Now a 2-story restaurant blocks the view.

“This has become yuppieville,” he said one recent morning. “This street used to be beautiful. Now it’s noisy, dirty and crowded.”

Duganne is irritated and restless, and not solely because of events on the street. Eight years ago the workshop changed from a membership operation, with as many as 100 people paying a monthly fee to use the facilities, to a cooperative of 10 or fewer professional artists. Gone are the classes that Duganne and others used to teach. Gone, too, is his a sense of excitement and discovery.

“We did a lot of photo silk-screening,” said Duganne, who has a fascination with technology. “It was the cutting edge of art. Warhol was using silk-screen.”

“We would work around the clock,” remembered Sheila Pinkel, an assistant professor of art at Pomona College who was an early workshop member. “There were nights all of us would be there screening all night. We kept going from the sheer pleasure of the discoveries we were making. None of us were commercially viable.”

But administering the membership workshop was a full-time job. When Duganne’s prints and photographs began selling, he turned his attention to making art and his workshop involvement dropped. Then personal troubles hit. These included a breakup with his wife, who had introduced him to art, and Duganne neglected the studio even more. Gradually, he said, the successful artists took over its operation, and a cooperative was formed.

Duganne continues to rent the building from its owner and keeps a work space there. But he has taken a job as a technical consultant to the art publishing firm Wieman Hinte Studios.

“I’d like to have a community workshop again,” he said. “There’s never been a place for people to pursue printmaking unless they already were successful. Maybe I should kick everyone out and start over.”

This last is said with a determination that rings false, for Duganne is fast friends with the workshop’s remaining artists and knows he would not ask them to leave. Bob Boreman, perhaps the most successful of the group, has been with the workshop 16 years.

“This place is exactly like a world,” said Boreman, 49. “We have border wars. People fight it out over where their space stops and the next person’s begins. If somebody way across the room changes something, it ripples over here.”

Disputes are settled by compromise.

“It’s like a family,” said Elizabeth Reday, 40, a workshop member since 1979. “We’ve been through so much together, when it comes time to vent spleen we don’t hold back. There’s no boss. We’re not going to get fired. So we rant, and we rave, and then we go to coffee.” She and Boreman work next to each other and argue on occasion about the spread of fumes from chalk fixer and other materials. At the same time, however, the two are producing monoprints--prints that are reworked by the artist after coming off the press, making every piece individual--and each credits the other with helping develop techniques.

Reday in particular contends that the workshop hasn’t lost its spirit of creativity.

“The beauty of this place is the cross-fertilization of ideas,” she said. “Especially in printmaking there are a lot of techniques. You see someone doing something, then develop that idea on your own. Also, other artists come in, and we talk about what’s happening. There’s a grapevine. We hear about dealers who aren’t paying their artists, things like that.”

Shoppers in Main Street’s many galleries won’t find works by the artists at Duganne’s Workshop. Most of it is sold to dealers who supply art to banks, corporate offices and the like.

“I sell thousands of pictures every year,” Boreman said. “Most of it, I don’t know where it goes. I just get a piece of the action.”

One of Reday’s first successes was a series of etchings for McDonald’s restaurants. Her work hangs in airports and hotels.

Sculptor Sam Leavitt, 42, sold a major piece to the Del Amo Fashion Center.

One workshop tenant, Al Bunyan, 54, is a sign painter and designer of store interiors.

“We walk a line between commercialism and fine art,” Reday said. “I used to have that ‘my-art-is-priceless’ attitude, but I’m making a living doing art. That’s worth a lot, and I insist on keeping it fresh and keeping it fun.”

Duganne, chronically restless, is feeling less than fresh and fun. He remembers how, as a premed student at UCLA, he dreamed one night of an art print made of photo microdots. It was his calling. He already had spent a year in Paris with his then-wife, an artist, where he “became totally enamored with the artist’s life style.”

At UCLA he began taking classes and soon was enamored with art itself.

“Very quickly it was life to me, it was love,” he said.

Teaching jobs and the workshop followed in quick succession, in part because Duganne was driven, in part because he brought a fresh slant to printmaking.

“Jack understood the technical side where most artists didn’t,” remembered Max Hein, a Santa Rosa Junior College art teacher who, as a graduate student, was Duganne’s mentor at UCLA. “They cared more about images. Jack did a lot of research with coating surfaces with new materials, with converting equipment to new uses.”

Duganne recalls working and playing hard.

“It was part of our image of the artist as intuitive and out of control,” he said. “A lot of us either got sober or died. I had the attitude that there were a lot of no-vision, no-talent people who only cared about their cars and houses and vacations and kids and credit ratings. Now I crave that kind of life.”

Hence the day job. Duganne still visits the workshop some mornings. He remains convinced that “artists don’t learn from nature, they learn from each other.”

But increasingly he does his learning outside the workshop, from other artists, galleries and publishing houses that use new printing techniques.

“A real school of art developed there,” he said of the Main Street landmark, “but I see myself becoming more involved with the art world at large.”