The Soul of an Old Machine
It’s a brave new world of printing technology out there: everything from on-demand digital book printers, ink-jet machines as wide as a barn door and thundering four-color presses. And yet, down in the technological underbrush, there lurk a few craftsmen whose vest-pocket shops and handmade work would be perfectly comfy to an artist from, say, 14th century Mantua or Venice.
One artisan keeping the light of old-style printing sputtering is Patrick Merrill, at 52 the sole proprietor of a tidy 1,600-square-foot atelier in smoggy Montclair. Tucked away in a generic tilt-up industrial park, he proudly upholds the ageless tradition of “the grunt press.” If you’re an artist with a printing plate tucked under your arm, Merrill will happily crank out your work, probably offering you hints and disputations on artistic and political philosophy along the way. That open-door policy differentiates Merrill from what he calls, a bit testily, “star shops,” such as Gemini G.E.L. or Cirrus, “blue chip” operations producing invitation-only work for big-time artists. For his part, Merrill revels in what he calls the “anti-capitalist, blue-collar democracy of the small press.”
Transplanted at an early age from Toronto to Venice (the L.A. version), he was immediately hooked on “the noise, the smells--it thrilled me.” In 1971, back from a tour of duty in Vietnam, Merrill wandered into a night printing class at Golden West College. By 1981, he was a nomadic printer, moving from job shop to job shop. In 1998, he decamped to his current digs in the Inland Empire.
The shop is bright and amazingly clean; four presses (two Ettans, a Griffin and a tiny letterpress rig) sit shrouded under cloth drapes. Merrill is a fanatic for “low toxicity” in his chemical-laden trade, and the shop has few of the ink smells one associates with printing. A small front gallery displays his moody, politically inspired etchings and life-size self-portrait woodcuts.
Merrill’s client list these days is heavily larded with European expat printmakers from Hungary, Russia, Switzerland, Argentina, Bosnia, England--but he won’t print for just anyone who walks in the door. “I’ll talk to them first,” he says. “I look at their philosophy, why they want to do this project, because there are hundreds of ways of generating an image, and the way you make your work should fit in with what you’re trying to say. I won’t deal with pure representation--people who come in and say, ‘I’ve got this painting I want to make into a print,’ I send ‘em away. You’ve got to work originally.” Easy rules to live by, all told.
