Black Heart Press

Patrick Wagner
The Last Graveyards (detail scans)
etching and chine-collé on cream Hahnemühle paper
Helsinki 2013

Probably the worst tipped hat made to Ad Reinhardt’s Last Paintings ever, these scans show details from three of the (for now) final Graveyard Prints I’ve made. 
Etched copper plates, printed with white ink on black Ingres paper, chine-collé together with assorted Asian papers on cream / very off-white Hahnemühle paper.

For the upcoming final exhibition I’ve printed the largest format Graveyard Prints so far, sheet size 170x125cm, with more than 100 small plates per print, all plates ofc with their own little collé paper. (A tiny insight here: http://kuvankevat.fi/blogi/patrick-wagner)

While I love working on those plates and printing chine-collé <3, I have to admit that by now I’m pretty exhausted by the subject matter (as hinted at in my last post about it, from this January), or rather: my interpretation thereof. So for now taking a break from mementoing mori.

Anyway, enjoy! 

Further reading:

Junip - Line of Fire:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSaDElz7wSI

and part 2:

Junip - Your Life Your Call:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvKXVoAXmg

BlinG
Photogravure, 30x40cm
Gampi on Hahnemühle
Helsinki 2012
by Valerie Schmidt & Patrick Wagner

BlinG is the alias of British player Samayan Kay, playing for Team Dignitas. The photos were taken backstage at the ASUS ROG Assembly Winter 2012 tournament in Helsinki.
Valerie chose to arrange 4 shots for this photogravure, an idea that I was initally sceptic about, but really grew to love during plate making and proofing.

BlinG @ Liquipedia:
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/BlinG

Previous posts:
sLiko
TitaN
TLO aka TheLittleOne

For more about PROGAMER, the photogravure project we’ve been working on last year - see posts here, here, here and here.

Further reading:

Samayan messing with your stereotypes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9FSiB7ZooY

sLivko
Photogravure, 30x40cm
Gampi on Hahnemühle
Helsinki 2013
by Valerie Schmidt & Patrick Wagner

sLivko is the alias of Russian player Artem Garavtsov, who back then played for team RoX, now Virtus.pro. We photographed him at the Dreamhack Eizo Open tournament held in Globen, Stockholm last April.
Love his seriousness.

A scan from PROGAMER, the photogravure project I’ve been working on last year together with Valerie (see posts here, here, here and here)

And yes, that likkle bright spot on the right, shows how sensitive the autotype paper is - faintest trace of grease on the exposure unit’s glass..

Here’s a no-so-recent game of sLivko, cast by Husky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlDg9KFdj84

Liquipedia::
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/SLivko

Further reading:

Planetary Assault Systems - Flat Tire:
http://youtu.be/gTnqIhDsFcg (so good)

TLO
Photogravure, 30x40cm
Gampi on Hahnemühle
Helsinki 2012
by Valerie Schmidt & Patrick Wagner

Another scan from PROGAMER, the photogravure project I’ve been working on last year - (see posts here, here, here and here)

TLO is the alias of German player Dario Wünsch, playing for Team Liquid. We photographed him at the ASUS ROG Assembly Winter 2012 tournament in Helsinki, more than a year ago, with his beard in full glory.
Charismatic guy with a great fashion sense and an even greater sense of humor ;)

Official site:
http://www.teamliquidpro.com/liquidtlo

TLO on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/DarioTLO

If you’ve ever wondered how StarCraft II looks like from the player’s perspective, here’s a recorded stream of his daily practice, games start around 05:00min
http://www.twitch.tv/liquidtlo/b/388654932

TLO’s Liquipedia page:
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/TLO

Further reading:

Interview with Dario from March 2013:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6ql1lKpOeI

TitaN
Photogravure, 30x40cm
Gampi on Hahnemühle
Helsinki 2012
by Valerie Schmidt & Patrick Wagner

Over the next few days I will slowly post scans of the photogravure project I’ve been working on last year - see posts here, here, here and here.

TitaN is the alias of Russian player Oleg Kuptsov, playing for team RoX. We photographed him at the ASUS ROG Assembly Winter 2012 tournament in Helsinki, more than a year ago.
Great and super friendly guy, I’m absolutely into his focus and pose in this photogravure.

Here’s a relatively recent game of his:
http://youtu.be/_hTGhRzDEbo?t=3m5s

And here his Liquipedia entry, the Wikipedia of StarCraft II:
http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/TitaN_(Russian_player)

Further reading:

Not entirely satisfied with my documentation yet - usually I’m all for scanning prints in high res, like I did with this one - but now I notice that the eye, when seeing the print from a reasonable distance like, say 50cm, tends to smoothen out the print a lot more, the scanning kinda prevents that - or the screen viewing experience. Ho-hum.

INSIDE THE SHOP: Christian Bazant-Hegemark

Here are some photos of my collaboration with with Austrian painter Christian Bazant-Hegemark, who recently stayed over in Helsinki for a week to work on a series of prints with me.
We’ll be releasing a portfolio of intaglio prints this autumn and did quite a bit of work for that.

Since he was already in the shop, we threw in some lithos for good measure :) Christian’s a great guy, and I’m really looking forward to making more kick-ass prints with him. We listened to Grinderman2 way too much during the week he was here.. great music that makes me want to kick over stuff and watch it break - however it inspired Christian to make the finest, softest drypoints I ever had the pleasure to print. So fine that we started to steelface the plates for proofing and stripped them afterwards, to protect them as much as possible. Joy!
Will post updates as the project fleshes out..

Further reading:

Heathen Child:
http://vimeo.com/15219255

Kitchenette:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sX6VjxL3bAk

Patrick Wagner
Graveyard Prints
Etching on copper, chine-collé on Zerkall paper
Helsinki 2012

It’s crazy to think that I’m working on the “Graveyards” series since 2010. A lot has happened since then (here’s one of the first ones), and the four prints currently hanging in the offices of Fondia, a large legal firm in Helsinki are the only unsold Graveyards - all others are somewhere out there, making people happy and keeping me above the water.
Still, it feels like I’ve reached some form of a plateau with the prints - they’re in a spot where I am comfortable with them, and could happily print three dozen more. Which, funny enough, is exactly the reason to step back from the series for a while.

That said, there’s always a last time - the print shown above is 37x26cm or so. While researching for my Zerkall post I discovered that JPP stocks Zerkall sheets in 110x225cm, 350gsm - and that got me thinking.
Once the photogavure project is done (my #1 sentence for 2013) I’d like to order some, and then pull two or three large prints, using all of the 100+ small grave plates I’ve etched so far, with their second colour plate and collé. I’ll need a lot of extra hands for this, I imagine we’ll be four of five people registering and colléing, the only steps where speed matters. Can’t wait!

For now, enjoy some close-ups from a selection of Graveyard prints. 

Further reading:

The Knife! <3 Full Of Fire
http://youtu.be/DoH6k6eIUS4

Sneak preview:
I sold a print today, and since the spice must flow, I decided to insta-buy a Franz von Bayros print. Doing my utmost to stay patient and wait for the print to arrive in Helsinki so that I can scan it / post it.

Btw: wtf tumblr, this new interface sucks, when writing on a small netbook. :(

GHOST PARK KILLING

I’m about a year behind in updates, when it comes to my own projects. Time to use this sunday to spotlight a collaboration that was very dear to me, the “Ghost Park Killing” project. Together with Swedish artist Magnus Dahl yours truly tackled the writings of Jeff Noon. I’ll try to keep this short and concise, but will have to embark on a few tangents.

The idea to work with Noon’s writings has been present since I first read Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation in 1998/9. I originally registered the nymphomation.de domain for some web art attempts, sometime in 2003 or so, back when I was still studying English. It hosts my portfolio now, btw.

Somehow in 2011 the time was right, Magnus and I were looking into doing a collaborative project, and Jeff Noon had started exploring alternative ways of reaching out to his readership, via twitter. I felt that it would be nice to create an analog counterpart to his new output, emailed around a bit and got in touch with Jeff, who directed me to his agent Michelle for details. Once it was established that we were harmless we got green lights, and started working through the Sparkletown output Jeff had uploaded as @temp_user9. 

I feel that we somehow failed to get Jeff excited about what we were going to do, so while we got the go ahead we somehow couldn’t establish a dialogue where Jeff could have given his input too. I blame this mostly on my inexperience and working on a non-existant budget.

In the end Magnus came over to Helsinki for 9 days, we talked for a day, outlining the project and doing some rough doodles, deciding on a 310cm long and 48cm high sheet of kozo paper, folded as a ten-page-leporello with the ability to unhinge the covers to display the book as a single sheet.
The quotes we’ve chosen to work from were handwritten on copper plates, printed on Magnani paper and tucked into some kind of ‘photo corners’ I bound on the inside of front and back cover. 
Oh yes, and the whole thing was printed in a edition of 10, plus 3 artist prints and one “remix” on 9g/m² gampi paper. 

(Click here for a scan of the entire sheet in higher resolution 5476x1000px, jpg) 

Since Jeff’s Sparkletown (and previous works) deal, among others, with concepts like remixing / salvaging, we established a couple of parameters to work along - for the woodcuts, the ink was altered a little for each print, sometimes even dramaticly so. The four lithographs and two woodcuts on the long sheet were registered with 5cm leeway each, which together with the leporello folding produced quite a bit of variation. Like jazz variations, or like a dj playing through a set, where one tune follows another, the needle isn’t always placed at the very same second. This probably only matters to the artists, who get to see all versions of the edition, but still - it seemed like the right thing to do.

We tried to avoid doing a direct illustration of the tweets, and thus seperated the text our works originated from (etching, on the back of the covers) and our ‘remix’ of Jeff’s output (woodcuts and lithographs on the kozo sheet).
At first I wanted to print on the cloth of the covers as well, but ultimately was persuaded to not do so. I might still give it a try if I ever get round to binding the version we pulled on gampi.

So much for short and concise.
Anyway, we exhibited the book and some spin-off prints at Rönnells Antikvariat in Stockholm earlier this year (See here for exhibition documentation and better pics of the book), and I have just today found time and energy to get Jeff’s copy of the book on its way to the UK. Definitely room for improvement when it comes to further projects, but I’m still very proud of the result.

Further reading:

Rejoice, poor you that has read all of today’s entry. This is BHP’s 200th post on tumblr! Which means that I don’t only get to say thank you very much to 323 followers (which in Pokémon is Camerupt, a pretty awesome vulcanic camel creature. Need I say more?) and I also get to link this amazing video, for no apparent reason. Speakers up + fullscreen!

Jeff Noon’s Metamorphiction:
http://www.metamorphiction.com/

The six tweets we used (inside the front cover):
1. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126760517644722176
2. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126761316919676930
3. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126761589360705536
4. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126761840842784768
5. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126762198293950464
6. https://twitter.com/temp_user9/status/126762611789402112

And the remix Jeff wrote thereof:
http://www.metamorphiction.com/index.php/sparkletown-015-remix/

PROGAMER
Little do most of you know, but this weekend Shanghai hosted the “2012 Battle.net World Championship” where 18 year old Korean player Won “PartinG” Lee Sak took first place in Starcraft2, winning a whooping $100.000 in prize money. And that’s just the tip of the E-Sports ice berg that is emerging in Europe and North America at the moment (Korea had like a 10y head start).

Berlin-based photographer Valerie Schmidt and yours truly are following the professional Starcraft2 gaming scene since more than a year, photographing backstage at events, capturing portraits of the players. Right from the beginning, when we got together and started talking about the project, it was clear that we wanted them as photogravures, as a kind of an analogue counterweight to the digital world these athletes compete in.
Now, about a year in the making we’re finally at a stage where things start manifesting in the printshop - I’ve spent some time at Trykkeriet in Bergen, Norway, producing the first 17 photogravures of the project, and am now back in Helsinki, pulling prints.

For those of you who work with copper plate photogravures that etch through a sensitized gelatine resist the video linked above might be a bit long-winded and overly descriptive (and, I’m beginning to fear, it might also demand a lot from the supposedly faster-wired attention spans of the gaming community), for those new to it or not in the know, I hope you’ll get something out of it.
I very much prefer to print my photogravures en collé on fine gampi or other Japanese and Korean papers (some woodblock papers work surprisingly well) - the results are far superior to pulling a print on mould made paper alone - the gampi especially gets all the information in the plate.

Am currently trying to get sponsorship for German mould made paper to use as backing paper, and would love to get some fine silk to pull a few prints on. The prints will be exhibited in Helsinki in February, but I’ll post about that in due time.
Anyway, promised myself I wouldn’t write a three page essay for once, so keeping this one short and sweet. 

Further reading:

The usual suspects:
Valerie Schmidt - http://valerieschmidt.de/
Patrick Wagner - http://nymphomation.de/PRO.html

Interview from back in the day, when we were shooting at Assembly in Helsinki: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJFtKnEYvGM

The Battle.net World Championship:
http://us.battle.net/bwc/en/

Working on a project like this it is crazy to think how many people I owe thanks to already - David Stordahl for all his photogravure excellence, all the players that were kind and understanding enough to participate despite the stressful conditions at the events, the event admins and staff from Assembly in Helsinki and Dreamhack in Stockholm, Trykkeriet Bergen, KUVA Helsinki, and many more.
How’s that for the stereotype of the grumpy printmaker that likes to stay and work on his or her own? ;)
 

Bucharest Memories

I really enjoyed living in Romania, and posted pictures of the printshop there some months ago. It was during those days that I wrote, from the top of my head, a little booklet of intaglio instructions for a back then love interest and now good friend. The original was in two or three colours, lacking a scanner I photocopied the booklet back then, and recently sat down and scanned my bw copy.
Pictured are spreads 13, 14, 23, 24, 35, 38 and 39. A lot of the stuff I wrote back then badly needs to be edited / expanded, and most of the drawings are of course rather generic, but still - maybe you’ll enjoy them a bit.

Further reading:

Can’t fuck with science, after all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyXJ1sAQtaY  

A lot of the stuff I wrote back then is confusing, because I didn’t really know the English words for things, like tarlatan, so I wrote cotton instead. Then again, you can also wipe plates with cotton, if there is no tarlatan.