It’s Sunday afternoon, and Laura Master is hunched over a large piece of linoleum in the parking lot of the NW Marine Art Works studio omniplex, deep in the heart of the Northwest Industrial District. She's using a gouge to delicately apply finishing touches on a massive linocut of a cityscape populated by bunnies. “I wanted to do a city landscape, but I didn’t necessarily wanna do people,” she says. “And I love bunnies.”
Masters and other gathered printmakers soak a ton of ink into a rolling pin-looking thing that soaks up ink off of a piece of glass. Then, Master and other gathered artists press the roller onto her city of bunnies linocut, pushing hard so the linocut drinks in as much of the ink as possible. When the linoleum is sated, two of our artists pick up the print and gently set it on a large piece of paper sitting on top of a slab of wood on the ground. They are delicate and precise, making sure the linocut is lined up straight on the print, fretting over dust and anything else that might compromise the final product. When it’s all straight, they place a big green pad over the linocut.
Master hops on the steamroller, fires it up, and drives the big steel cylinder over the whole thing twice, impressing the ink on the linocut into the paper. This is the PDX Steamroller Print Fest.
“Steamroll printing is a completely wonderful and irreverent art [for] printmakers who want to do giant linocuts that are usually too big to fit inside a press,” says the owner of Atelier Meridian, a printmaking studio in North Portland and the organizer of the day’s event. “We need to borrow a steamroller, or, in this case, we rented one, and it’s surprisingly cheap to rent a steamroller for the day. Even if you don’t know how to drive it, they’ll just rent it to you anyway.”
Pagliarulo knows how to drive a steamroller too, but she didn't the first time she rented one.
“The guy who rents it to you usually shows you the on/off switch, how to go forward, how to go back. Then they let you have the key, and you do with it what you will—which is nutty." Pagliarulo explains. "This is a pretty well-known phenomenon among printmakers. All over the world, there are printmakers renting steamrollers and creating prints in the streets.”
After Master presses the print, she hops off the steamroller and helps to lift the now-inked paper. An audible sticky peeling sound comes from the separating print. This is a moment suffused with overwhelming tension. People here for the festival gather around. The peel is slow, excruciating.
The tension breaks as the print comes free: It's beautiful, deep black, and shows very little spotting or streaking. The printmakers walk it to a side room, and hang with the other prints that were steamrolled this weekend.
Printmaking is a storied tradition in Portland, largely due to the legacy of Ray Trayle, a machinist who served in Navy Shipyards during World War II and worked at Archer Blower and Pipe in Southwest Portland for more than three decades. After he retired, Trayle killed time by building more than 65 fine-art presses that have drifted around the Portland area, churning out prints by local lithographers ever since.
Master never intended to focus so heavily on printmaking. She went to college for painting, but now she's the owner and operator of PlatemarkX, a printmaking studio in Portland—in addition to being an urban rabbit enthusiast. “"I fell in love with printmaking," She says. "Something about it just called to me. The process was more intense than just painting for me. There was more to learn, more to it. It’s an underdog artform. A lot of times, printmakers aren’t considered real artists. They’re considered craftspeople, especially with letterpressing, and I tend to flock to an underdog community. It just seemed to me, sitting down and painting was really easy and printmaking is more challenging to me.”
Emily Riley, the operator of RX Letterpress, was pressing an old block of a fox hunting with a background of the “Interstate spaghetti”—her way of describing the intersecting arches of highways where Interstate 5 and Interstate 84 cross in the Central Eastside. She noted she came to printmaking for the precise opposite reason: “I had been making art my whole life, but this had a dynamism to it that interested me more than painting and drawing. I feel that painting and drawing require more emotional investment. There’s a certain level of darkness with me and painting, where I have to get really deep into my emotions to paint something that means anything to me. It doesn’t always come from a palace of joy.”
To Riley, lithography offers a buffer. “A lot of it is just so process oriented.” She might spend 8-10 hours drawing the image onto the block, but the next part, carving or etching the drawing into the plate, takes 30-40 hours of carving. She emphasizes that hers is a particularly comprehensive process, and that great prints can be made in less time. “That is a much more even tempered pursuit for me. A lot more in the making of the thing, instead of this dark inspiration that you have to draw on.”
Another Atelier Meridian printmaker, Olivia Nogueira Wheaton, was operating a booth where kids and enthusiastic adults could press rubber, ink-drenched fish onto paper with a rolling pin. She explained the technique was based on Gyoatu, a traditional Japanese printmaking method where the same technique is executed with real fish.
Wheaton learned copper etching in high school, and decided that this was "the rest of her life. “I wanna touch it, I wanna smell the inks, I wanna be where it’s happening, currently. I love that print is originally a mode of communication, it’s how we got the word out. Most people didn’t even take the time to learn to read until it was like ‘Oh shit, there’s prints everywhere. I should probably learn how to read. I feel like it’s the ultimate inspiration not only to have the knowledge to read it but also to publish whatever you want, I think that era of print is dead and I want to bring it back. I wanna make sure the analogue side doesn’t die and we can always have freedom of speech if we make our own posters.”
“Printmaking is inherently in multiples, so when you’re making something you’re not making a product. You’re making a matrix that is the mold for the product. I get really caught up with one of ones. I stopped making paintings because I can’t sell them without losing them. Printmaking allows me to let go of my work because I have multiples of them. It changes how you deal with your work.”
The day’s event was a cross discipline event, in a way: Riley and Pagliarulo are linocut artists, Master usually works with a letterpress, and Christy Nyboer, owner of Little Lark, also helped out and is a screen printer. What unites all of them is a common enthusiasm for print parties, says Pagliarulo: “Printmakers are a communal bunch. We love sharing tools and sharing our knowledge and getting together and making prints.”
