Today I met with a wonderful artist Dennis Aufiery. I am going to be featuring his work in the only show that I have in my gallery this year. That’s how impressed I am with his work! Look forward to seeing a tiny video on this fine artist’s work in one of my up-coming Friday Blogs, ‘Catch a Rising Star.’ Anyway, many people have been approaching him on getting his work made into giclees. He was very uncertain about the whole theory of this kind of printing as are many artists as well as the art-buying public. His idea of fine art printing was strictly limited to hand-pulled prints done by the artist themselves. I said that this was one type of fine art printing. And may I emphasize the words ‘fine art printing.’ We are not talking about ‘fine art reproduction.’ I believe that that is where most of the confusion arises from. They are really two very different things. Fine art printing has a very different look from, let’s say, an original oil mainly because of the techniques and the limitations involved.
However, if one is after a fairly accurate reproduction of an original oil painting, this type of hand-pulled print is not the way to accomplish it. Again, one is fine art printing and the other is fine art reproduction. Lithography and Serigraphy were the two widely accepted forms of fine art reproduction until a decade ago when giclees began to gain technical prowess. Now there is wide acceptance throughout the gallery and even the museum world of the giclee process. No form of reproduction can capture the wide range of color and the finite detail like the giclee process. Of course, to many people, giclees are just a digital reproduction process. As one of the first artists to publish her own work back in 1995 with Harvest, one of the first giclee companies (if not the first) in the country, I have been part of this incredible process throughout its infancy with all its kinks and problems. Today’s giclee technology is about as close to perfection as one can get when it comes to fine art reproduction. For three years, I even owned my own giclee company. So I truly understand this process inside and out, and I’m here to say that good quality giclee reproduction takes tremendous expertise, the most expensive equipment money can buy, and combining both of those with the proper substrates and laminates available. Thus, no two giclee companies are alike. One may use great equipment but cheap out on the substrates (canvases or papers), which are not the most compatible with the inks that their machines use. Or the laminates are cheap and/or not applied correctly. Or they didn’t spend enough on their color correcting software so that the color capture doesn’t translate to the printer properly. I could go on and on.
In this area of the world, I would recommend only one giclee company and that’s M and M Studios. I like this company (and I’ve used every printer around here at one time or another) because Matt their main technician really knows what he’s doing and they have some of the top-of-the-line equipment. Plus they use all the right materials and do an excellent job with their laminates. I put several giclee prints in the windows of my new showroom recently and had problems with a few of them cracking. True they were very close to the window and lately there have been plenty of dramatic swings in our temperature, so it is no wonder that I had a problem. But it was interesting to see that several, all from different companies had problems except for M and Ms. I will go into the selling theories of giclee prints in my next Monday Blog…stay tuned!
