Celebrating 15 Years: Part 1

By Constance Lewallen

At Paulson Bott Press, instinct, and even passion, directs the selection of artists. This is how the press came to work with the women from the Gee’s Bend, Alabama, quilt collective. A quilting center since before the Civil War, Gee’s Bend is known for colorful, quasi-geometric designs that, although based on historical American and African examples, appeal to a modern art sensibility. The highly successful multi-museum tour of Gee’s Bend quilts organized in 2002 by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, brought international fame to this small, rural community. Pam Paulson happened to see that exhibition when it was presented in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art and fell in love. When she showed the catalog to her father, he suggested the press invite the quilters to make prints.  Long story short, Pam and Renee Bott were able to interest two generations of quilters --Mary Lee Bendolph, whom Pam calls “ the heart and soul of the Gees Bend quilters,” and her daughter-in-law Louisiana Bendolph.

Gee's Bend, Alabama, circa 1937; Mary Lee Bendolph, Past & Gone, 2005

Once they had a commitment, Pam and Renee needed to figure out how to capture the essence of Gee’s Bend quilts in an entirely different medium. They bought sewing machines so that the women could compose their prints by piecing small quilt tops. The elder artist followed the tradition of using worn clothing that she believed carried the presence of the former owner, while Louisiana Bendolph preferred new, bright, solid-colored fabrics. After the artists and printers chose the best designs for prints, the printers made impressions of the quilted pieces with soft ground. Pam remembers, “Each time we pulled a proof there was a hallelujah or a praise Jesus. Often in a quiet moment Mary Lee would break into a gravelly soulful rendition of a church song accompanied by Lou's rhythmically syncopated clapping.” A second project included two more quilters, and, like the first, resulted in a dazzling array of images—evoking such modern masters as Paul Klee and Stuart Davis but with a spirit all their own. While it’s true that etchings and quilts are two different animals–obviously the prints have no texture or functionality–the designs translate magnificently from one medium to the other, and, like quilts, etchings are hand-made and in their own way evoke the hand of the maker.

Thanks to their experience at Paulson Bott, the quilters now think of themselves as artists. And, they appreciate that through the distribution of their graphic images their work has become appreciated by a wider public.

Mary Lee Bendolph in Paulson Bott Press Studio

I begin with the Gee’s Bend project, because it demonstrates the press’s approach: the artist’s vision comes first; Pam and Renee then find a way, even if it means inventing and developing new techniques, to realize that vision. For Chris Ballantyne, it was printing on Gampi (translucent Japanese paper) and affixing the color prints to plywood so that the grain showed through (an effect the artists was using in his work at the time). For Isca Geenfield-Sanders, Renee, along with Don Farnsworth of Magnolia Press, devised a method of putting a digital image directly onto a copper plate without using
 a darkroom.  And, when Radcliffe Bailey returns to the press next year, they hope to use some of the techniques they mastered in creating a recent series of the artist’s monoprints, which combine sewing, chine colle, printing, dying, and collage. Conversely, Bailey is applying the new tools he learned at the press to his studio work. In other words, at Paulson Bott, artists not only benefit from the broad dissemination of images that multiples afford, but they are expected to approach the medium creatively, to explore, with the master printers as guides, the medium’s unique characteristics. Most importantly, as noted in the cases of Gee’s Bend, and Bailey, just two examples among many, printers and artists working collaboratively can arrive at new techniques and methods that expand not only the possibilities of printmaking but of the creative process itself.

Chris Ballantyne, Untitled Berm, Pool, Submerged Rocks, Cliff, 2004

From the beginning Renee and Pam have worked with local artists, recognizing that the San Francisco Bay Area has a vibrant and varied art scene that too often is not adequately acknowledged. They have built strong relationships with such established Bay Area artists as Squeak Carnwath, Christopher Brown, Hung Liu, and Deborah Oropallo, but also support the region’s emerging artists like Kota Ezawa, David Huffman, Shaun O’dell, and Tauba Auerbach, whose careers they have helped foster. The press also collaborates with such prominent, national figures as Martin Puryear, Caio Fonseca, and Kerry James Marshall. There is no house look – something the owners agree is to be avoided. Styles range from Greenfield-Sanders’s charming figurative domestic scenes, to the cartoon realism of Mission School artists Chris Johanson and the late Margaret Kilgallen, to the abstract cosmologies of Ross Bleckner.

Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Blue Suit Bather, 2006

Located in a sun-filled studio and gallery in Berkeley, Paulson Bott Press has established itself as a leading intaglio press and publisher, not just on the West Coast, but nationally. Their prints are now found in major museum collections across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York; the National Gallery and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among many others.

While we can’t predict what’s to come as Paulson Bott enters the next phase, based on its history we can be confident that it will be both surprising and, somehow, just right.

Squeak Carnwath

By Samuel Carr-Prindle

It was a treat to have Squeak Carnwath return to our studio this past February. She came in with a sense of comfort and confidence as if she were simply picking up where she had left off. Though Squeak is a self-described “painting chauvinist,” she is also a highly adept and creative printmaker. The revelry and material play that characterizes her paintings is also evident in her prints. Like several of her Bay Area peers (Chris Brown and Hung Liu for example), Squeak fully embraces the physicality of the intaglio process, with its drawing-like potential to continually add and subtract information. Her prints employ a wide variety of processes and means of mark-making. During this project, the plate-making involved hardground, softground, scraping, burnishing, sanding, sugar lift, aquatint and some playful chine-collé. Her heavily layered approach to building printed images yields an ink density and visual richness that parallels the sensuous, satin surfaces of her paintings.

Pam Paulson proofing in the Paulson Bott Studio, 2011

Squeak Carnwath in the Paulson Bott Press Studio, 2011

One of Squeak’s greatest strengths is her ability to share her inner emotional world in a way that is remarkably generous and relatable to others. She has consistently managed to touch on themes and issues that affect most people with a specificity that lends them significant weight and resonance. The work serves as a record of her fears, desires, musings and the ongoing self-knowledge she’s gained through the bittersweet solitude of the painting studio. Though her work has an overt stream-of-consciousness style, I was surprised by just how diaristic it really is.

One afternoon towards the end of the project Squeak said that she felt envious of some of her fellow artists who had additional activities and passions outside of their art studios, whether it was making music, playing sports, writing, or dancing. Who hasn’t wondered at sometime what their life might be like if they had made different choices, made different priorities, pursued other interests, and worked at different things. From this discussion she came up with the phrase she included in the print Light: “I wish I did something else (in addition to what I do) but I don’t.” This musing, however, wasn’t an expression of regret so much as an acknowledgement of the decades of focused dedication she’s given to painting.



Squeak Carnwath, I Wish, 2011, Color Aquatint Etching, Published by Paulson Bott Press 



Squeak Carnwath, Medicine (detail), 2011, Color Aquatint Etching, Published by Paulson Bott Press 

Squeak was also preparing to undergo major foot surgery and was lamenting the nuisances of aging when she casually turned to me and informed me that she’d be purchasing a gun to give to me, so that I could shoot her like a lame horse when she became too frail or senile to live with the degree of dignity she desired. After a short silence she burst out laughing at my slack-jawed expression before adding, "But seriously, do it.”  This mix of existential dread and humor spills over into the work in a mixture that is simultaneously serious and amusing.

These paradoxes within her work help foil one-dimensional readings of her art. The sweetness of her pastel palette and the child-like imagery frequently belie the gravity of her themes and ideas. The candelabra, while a symbol of creation and a source of illumination, also serves as a memento mori. It resembles some of her older motifs, such as the vinyl LP, in which there is an anticipated end. Yet her attitude towards fleeting beauty and our temporality is not as fatalistic as it may seem. In Not Known, she encourages the viewer to “thrive in the unknown and unknowable.”  This simple statement nicely encapsulates what it means to be an artist; to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty, doubt, and near-limitless choice. Despite the black humor and occasional morbidity, there is an underlying optimism about our capacity to flourish in a world of constant unpredictability.

Slow Art

by Pam Paulson

Berkeley is considered by many to be a bastion of the Slow Food movement. Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, and other local stars have challenged our need for speed. At Paulson Bott Press, we can relate. Making etchings is a methodical endeavor. The process demands tenacity. We often sow the seeds for projects years in advance. Once the artist is in the studio, we carefully tend the task of making the prints.  Sometimes the idea emerges right away and we refine, and other times it’s more trial and error. It’s Slow Art.

Kerry James Marshall, "Better Homes, Better Gardens",  1994 Courtesy Denver Art Museum



Our experience with the artist Kerry James Marshall is a case in point. When I first heard him speak, I was amazed. ( If you ever get a chance to hear him, do!) Renee and I had just begun to publish prints when we flew down to San Diego in 1997 to meet Kerry and invite him to work with us. I remember my enthusiasm for his painting and for the visionary path he intended to carve through art history. I also recall my dismay when he didn’t immediately agree to come to our studio that fall. We kept at it.




Kerry James Marshall, "Visable Means of Support: Monticello and Mount Vernon", 2009 Courtesy SF MOMA

 Last year, 13 years after that initial invitation, while the dust was still settling in our new shop, Kerry finally came to Paulson Bott Press. Kerry was working on the installation of two murals, “Visible Means of Support: Monticello” and “Visible Means of Support: Mount Vernon ” in the atrium of SFMOMA, and we had the chance to collaborate. 



 We began with a very ambitious large image. As a young man, Kerry had tried etching. He had in mind a myriad of intaglio techniques that he would use to create the print. We started with a softground drawing of the basic image, then added successive plates (with aquatints, spitbites, sugarlift, and drypoint) to flesh out the color, value, and density. “Vignette (Wishing Well)” relies on a smorgasbord of techniques, including chine collé and hand painting, and it is a testament to patience. The print comprises six plates made over a two-week period.




Kerry James Marshall, "Vignette (Wishing Well)", 2010; Color Etching; Published by Paulson Bott Press

 During the first week, we were working towards a brightly colored image. Kerry introduced the idea of shaped plates to reinforce the structural components in the print. We all had fun wielding the metal nippers to cut the pieces of copper that were needed.  While we were proofing, the color direction changed, and some plates were abandoned.

Unused plates

Kerry in the Paulson Bott Studio

The multiple tinted greys required the plates to be inked "a la poupée" (several different colors inked on each individual plate). Four printers work 2.5 hours to ink and print a single print, and it takes an additional 1.5 hours to print hearts, chine collé them, and hand paint the prints before they are ready to be signed.

A single plate can go into the acid numerous times before reaching a final state. This is true of each plate making up the larger print as well as the single plate prints. “Untitled Woman” was rolled with hardground drawn on and etched nine times before we pulled the OKTP.



Nine working proofs of "Untitled (Woman)", 2010; Hardground Etching; Published by Paulson Bott Press

Slow Art is an apt description of what goes on at the press. Even when we are running around in a frenzy, we cannot go faster than the process's inherent physicality, we cannot rush the steps and stages and the resonance of the image and our understanding of what the artist wants. It took awhile for this project to take root, and once it began to grow, it flourished. I hope you will be able to take a moment and spend some time with Kerry James Marshall’s exceptional work.