2008.08.25: Frank Grisdale's Visit

He approached me with several sheets of gampi torinoko paper with which I had no experience. The paper was nothing short of exotic: thin and strong with subtle texture and an internal luster and characteristic long fibres that need to be seen in real life to be appreciated. I was at Colours, the art store I normally deal with to get stretcher bars to stretch canvas prints, and spoke to their paper expert in Winnipeg about gampi torinoko and I was struck by a strange sense of familiarity when expressed joy that she had found someone that sought the paper and could look past the exhorbitant price because he or she could appreciate its value. It's the familiarity I experience when I meet an individual who can appreciate the difference between a file shot on a 16bit digital medium format back or when someone notices the texturing of light in my photos.

I tried to create an ICC profile for the paper using GretagMacbeth's Profilemaker 5 and the Epson 9800's driver but all of my attempts to profile it with PM5 failed miserably because the paper is unbleached and quite yellow. Strangely, my first acceptable results were with just printing using somewhat generic settings and manually tweaking colour balances. I was intrigued by Mr. Grisdale's determination to print on this paper and decided to upgrade my RIP to Ergosoft Posterprint 12. After several more test prints I was ready to do my first full test with the RIP-driven printing environment when I discovered that the rolls of gampi that Mr. Grisdale had ordered in were very different than the sheet gampi. It seemed as though this new gampi was only surface sized as opposed to internally sized with the gampi torinoko. This roll gampi turned out to be a gampi/pulp (perhaps wood pulp?) blend which had a very different texture and was even more yellow than the gampi torinoko. I believe that the problems I had profiling and printing this new gampi were due mostly to the lack of internal sizing of the paper. A young photographer by the name of Landon Speers whom I met when he was working with Frank on one of his new projects suggested using spray starch as a sizing agent to prevent the paper from absorbing excessive amounts of ink which led to feathering and muddling of darker tones. Landon drew from his own experiences of alternative analog printing. I reluctantly tried to spray starch the paper with up to a half dozen coats and found little change in the paper's absorbancy. At this point, the paper was very rippled and would not feed properly in my printer. The starch sizing technique is, however, interesting and I'll have to try it more later.

Frank compromised and agreed to print on InteliCoat Verona 285-Textured which is textured cold press paper manufactured by Arches of France and then coated for aqueous inkjet receptivity by InteliCoat in the US. Despite a number of companies touting new, high tech paper bases with newly developed, proprietary coatings, the colour profiles I created for the InteliCoat-prepared Arches proved to have noticeably deeper blacks and wider gamut than anything else I've come across and all this without optical brightening agents or an excessively fragile printing surface. While the gampi torinoko may have been ideal because of its unique texture, the bright white Arches with a well-developed inkjet-receptive coating will yield higher contrast and a wider colour gamut than I would be able to achieve with gampi torinoko with any printing technology that exists right now.

A shot of what the studio looked like when the artist dropped by to sign and package his prints. For the weekend, his work made my studio look very colorful. These prints are destined for Photographers' Gallery in Los Angeles, California.

The artist signing, specifying edition numbers on, and titling his work. My association with Frank so far has been rewarding and has helped reinforce that my purpose as a digital print maker has been served when I successfully remove my interpretation of the artists' original message and deliver colours and tonality as the artist had envisioned.