BRATTLEBORO — Art recently became more accessible to producers and patrons in downtown Brattleboro with the opening of Brattleboro Printmakers.
The studio, opened to the public in November 2014, was founded by Leigh Niland of Keene, N.H., who holds a master's degree in printmaking and teaches at New England College in Henniker, N.H., and James Primrose, who began printing on clay when he studied at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania.
Now that the studio is complete, the relatively low cost for entry has already brought in 15 members, and Primrose says he expects more.
Primrose says early supporters include Jonas Fricke of Putney, “who has done a lot of artwork here for The Future Collective. He was our first member.”
Members can offset their fees - today $80 per month or $800 per year - by volunteering their time at the studio in cleaning, maintenance, production, and instructing and monitoring novices.
Primrose says members have 24-hour access to the shop.
“Right now, we have the capacity to have 50 people in the room, and there's a schedule to sign up to use the space,” he says, noting the shop has “roughly five workstations.”
A four-hour day-rate option, for $25, exists for traveling artists and musicians in town for the short-term, or for locals unsure if they want to commit, “as long as they know how to use the equipment,” Primrose says.
For example, he adds, a band playing in town in need of T-shirts with their logo or artwork could come in and the shop would turn around a print run in a day.
Primrose explains the shop can turn out 400 to 500 T-shirts and 1,000 patches in a day: “Anybody who wants printing done can see the benefit.”
Primrose says many artists wanting to make prints of their works or use printmaking as their primary medium face prohibitive start-up costs: building or buying equipment and supplies and finding space to dedicate to printmaking.
“There's no print shop around here anywhere,” Primrose says, pointing out that the nearest commercial screenprinter is in Northampton, Mass. “But we're different: we provide education so artists can make their own stuff. Or we can print your project. You can get printing services here."
Classes begin this month. Primrose reports the shop will start with screen- and block-printing and soon will add basic papermaking and textile marbling.
On the shop's website, www.brattleboroprintmakers.com, the collective solicits other artists with printmaking expertise, as well as novices looking to learn.
“We'll be looking to expand into intaglio, litho, and relief techniques as we grow,” the site says.
Niland says Brattleboro Printmakers aims to have a booth at the Brattleboro Area Farmers' Market to sell members' art, and hopes to add profiles of member-artists to the shop's website.
“I'd like the shop to be self-sustaining by the spring,” Primrose says.
Later this year, he says, he hopes to procure a conveyer dryer, which would allow very fast curing for T-shirts and posters, and a roll press. The latter will let the shop turn out intaglio acid etching, he says, noting “we're open to other mediums, too, if they're not too expensive.”
Also by the spring the shop expects to bring in equipment necessary for papermaking, which requires a “small investment,” Primrose says, “but it's cost-effective and lowers the cost for artists, because they can make their own paper.”
Economy of scale
With this collective effort, artists can save money, Primrose says, because the studio has already been built.
According to Niland, producing and buying art is accessible and affordable: prints of an artist's works sell for much less than the originals. “Printmaking has traditionally been an affordable method of producing art. It's no-frills and functional,” she adds.
Carrying the cooperative ethos even further, Primrose suggests shop members pool their resources and buy ink in bulk, which brings production costs down even further.
“They just need to bring the substrates [fabric, clay, or paper on which to print] and the ink,” he adds. The only fabric the shop can't print on is fur.
Niland says prints are made from photographs, hand-drawn pieces, and stencils.
“Painters, illustrators, photographers, graphic designers, etc., can make prints of their work,” she says, adding that beginners are welcome. She mentions the shop's upcoming introductory classes.
“Having a membership here can sustain a small business,” Primrose says, then gives the example of a clothing designer: “An LLC can make their own T-shirts here, skip the middle man, and sell their shirts on the Internet. It gives them control over the materials, and allows them to even use recycled materials.”
Primrose says the shop can also print entire bolts of fabric, allowing designers even more control over their craft.
Primrose details the shop's comprehensive array of printmaking equipment:
“We have two four-color T-shirt carousels for printing textiles and small posters; two vacuum tables for printing flat paper such as posters; one wide-format table for printing larger signs, patches, and [bolts of] fabric; one exposing unit; one wash-out booth for cleaning out silkscreens; drafting space; and storage for screens."
The shop also provides supplies: “We have photo emulsion, and the solvents and strippers you use to remove and apply stencils,” Primrose says, adding that members can store their basic materials at the shop.
The shop also sells art directly to the public. Some of the pieces on display are prints made from the drawings of “Jaime,” a popular downtown artist and self-described “mystery man.” Most of Jaime's body of work seems to draw inspiration from Aztec, Mayan, and Mixtec imagery.
“I do litho plates to make a positive from the pieces Jaime draws on paper napkins using ballpoint pen,” Primrose says. “I shoot the images onto silkscreens and print them out” to fabric and paper.
Jaime allows Brattleboro Printmakers to sell the prints of his work to raise funds for the shop. A passerby in Brattleboro recently saw one of Jaime's prints silkscreened onto the back of a jacket.
Built from scratch
Primrose built all of the screenprinting presses for Brattleboro Printmakers, and he stretched his own screens.
“It's very DIY,” he explains. “I made all of the exposing units, too.”
Neal Tozier of Brattleboro is one of the print shop's volunteers. “I have no previous printmaking experience, but I'm now learning,” he says. He found out about the shop through his friendship with Primrose.
“I wanted to get involved with what he's doing,” Tozier explains.
Tozier enjoys photography and has some of his own photographs from which he wants to create prints.
Recently at the shop, Primrose showed a visitor a beautiful print, in deep red ink, made from a black-and-white photograph of the Brooks House that shows the northeast corner, including its iconic cupola.
“It's our first bitmap project,” Primrose says with evident pride, noting the four-color process - just like all processes used in-house - use only water-based, non-toxic ink.
“We don't use Plastisol,” he says, explaining the latter polyvinyl-chloride-based ink, although popular, is toxic.
Niland adds the shop has a water filter. All its processes are non-polluting: “We keep it more handmade” than other shops, she says.
Primrose says he hopes to add a letterpress to Brattleboro Printmakers's facilities, noting it, and other important print media, “are fading out because of computers. I want to teach people the older ways of printmaking.”
Of Brattleboro Printmakers' 15 members, Primrose says three are recent college graduates who need access for their “experiments,” and “75 percent of our current members know something about the printing process.”
A few, he said, “are just are excited to come down and play around with the equipment.”
Primrose assures interested parties that, were they to rack up so many day rentals that they find themselves paying more than the cost of a monthly membership, their fees would transfer to their membership. And, he says the shop's business model allows another opportunity for the membership fees to decrease:
“The more people we get to sign up as members, the lower the rates will be for everyone."
The shop has Keene State College students coming to use the facilities, because, as Primrose notes, “they don't have a print shop there.” He says plans are in the works to coordinate with Community College of Vermont and other local schools and colleges.
“We have a woman coming all the way from Alstead, N.H.,” Primrose says.
According to Robert Clements, co-owner of Zephyr Designs, the art supply and framing shop on Main Street, a few new faces, either new to the area, or hooked up with Brattleboro Printmakers, are buying printmaking supplies.
“One person from Burlington was in town specifically to visit the studio,” he says.
Clements says he brought a new line of printmaking paper into the shop this past summer. He adds the shop also carries paper made of mulberry wood for block-printing; the Canson printmaking paper line; and for screenprinters, the Rives and Stonehenge lines.
Clements says he hopes to see even more new faces, and adds his shop carries pretty much any supplies a printmaker needs, including, chemicals, fillers, drawers, photo emulsion, etching ink and tools, screenprinters' ink, and the screens themselves.
According to Ron Schneiderman, a Brattleboro musician, owner of the local music label Blueberry Honey, and a screenprinter, there's value in having a participatory art venue in town.
“People will come from all around to make things, and they'll go buy lunch while they're here,” which helps support aspects of the local economy beyond the arts, he says.
Niland and Primrose met in October 2014.
“We were both exhibiting our prints in the People's Building [in Brattleboro],” Niland says. “Our art openings were the same night.”
In talking, they realized they both needed a print shop but couldn't build one individually. So they teamed up.
Niland honed her craft in London at the East London Printmakers and the Dalston Print Club, and says she based Brattleboro Printmakers on those print models.
“Before Brattleboro Printmakers, I taught printmaking,” Niland says, but recently has been focusing more on painting and drawing in her art and her instruction because a lack of access to a print shop “shelved printmaking because it's difficult to have that kind of equipment at home.”
Primrose moved to the Brattleboro area in 2004 for a two-year apprenticeship with local potter Natalie Blake.
“Support for the arts drew me here,” Primrose says.
He knew about Brattleboro prior to his internship. “I have relatives in New England,” he says, and had “been through Brattleboro many, many times,” and had observed “people being creative” in the area.
Since then, Primrose says he has “done printing projects for bands in basements and garages,” producing musicians' T-shirts, posters, and patches.
Primrose says this about the town where he makes his home, his art, and now helps operate his collectively owned printmaking shop: “Everybody has a craft they do. It's really the best thing about Brattleboro.”
As Niland and Primrose planned and built the studio, Primrose says, they drew lots of moral support from locals but little financial backing.
Although the area houses “lots of creative talent, many people don't have the money” to become major donors, he says. With little outside funding to be had, the two “did this all out of pocket.”
Niland relates the enthusiasm she received from locals throughout the process of developing and building the print shop.
“Everyone asked us what was going on,” she says. “People are really taking an interest in a community-based studio. They have ideas for it, for what they want it to be in the community,” she adds, encouraging those with ideas to join Brattleboro Printmakers and “make it happen,” she says.
Local artists Deborah Bencosme and Scott Castle, producing their designs under the name castlepöp, are members of Brattleboro Printmakers.
“I'm thrilled. Printmaking was something I did when I lived in Brooklyn,” Castle says. He took a one-day intensive on printmaking and learned the skills but had no way to use them.
“I wanted more control over making our own stuff. I've been looking for a way to get involved in something like that here,” he says.
“Over the summer, we built the equipment from repurposed barn board and scrap wood, Castle says, noting Primrose provided Castle with additional printmaking instruction.
“By November, James was helping me print a piece Deborah and I did for a group show in Los Angeles,” he adds. The piece, “Fear & Loathing In Los Angeles,” part of Gallery 1988's “Crazy 4 Cult” exhibit, has already sold out two of its three available formats.
“It's wonderful to have a collective arts studio in downtown Brattleboro,” Castle says. “We're lucky that James and Leigh met each other and put this together.” He adds that the project “happened through sheer willpower."
For castlepöp, having Brattleboro Printmakers exist adds personal value to the art-making process. As Castle explains, “Instead of having to send our art to a company to do it for us, we did it ourselves with James' help. It's very satisfying to walk out of the studio with a finished work you can be proud of. We're part of the production process. We do art beginning to end. It's very empowering.”