Interview with James Lee

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM Interview #1771 LEE, JIM LEE, JIM (19-) Book Artist At UW: Interviewed: 2018 (2 sessions) Interviewer: Sarah Lange Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen Length: 2 hours, 47 minutes First Interview Session (June 15, 2018): Digital File 00:00:00 SL: Today is Friday, June 15, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the oral history program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Jim Lee, book artist, UW alum and founder of Blue Moon Press. I'm at the university archives in Steenbock Library, and Jim is in Connecticut. Jim, can you talk about growing up in Kansas and what that was like? JL: Sure. I grew up in Wichita, Kansas. That's sort of dead center in the country. I had a fairly conventional sort of middle class, suburban background. My father was an aeronautical engineer with Boeing for almost the whole period that I was growing up in the late '50s and early 1960s. My mother was a housewife. I have an older sister who's eight years older than I am. And although we're close, it's not like having a sibling that was nearer my age. So I was kind of on my own a lot, and kind of left to my own devices of entertaining myself. In terms of the art world, we had very little art going on in our house. No real art, per se, on the walls. Family photos, things like that. Wichita, Kansas was not exactly the hotbed of the visual art world, especially then. But I somehow got involved in taking some art lessons with an older lady in her basement for a couple of years. That usually involved flipping through magazines and finding images that I would want to draw from. And then sort of copying those images. It was not anything very intense at all, and I only did it for a couple of years probably in my late grade school, elementary school days. Other than that, I didn't really have any kind of art background other than taking art classes in school. And as I got older and the 1960s sort of progressed, I got more interested in music, and played the guitar. And was interested in typical 00:01:00 sort of 1960s era counterculture. Peter Max art. The Beatles, Bob Dylan, people like that. That was really influential things that sort of helped form me during my early adolescence. I began to see some pop art in the early '70s, people like Jim Dine and of course Andy Warhol. Those were big influences, I suppose, just in the kind of celebrity status of art making. But that was pretty much my beginnings of kind of looking at art. One thing that sort of did happen, though, and as I look back on it I find it more important than it was at the time, was somehow I found myself at the Wichita Art Museum, which is a fairly good little art museum. And I remember a painting by Ben Shahn called The Blind Botanist, which had kind of an expressionist, satirical 00:02:00 kind of look that I really responded to. I also saw a watercolor by Charles Birchfield, called winter moonlight. It's kind of a landscape of a moon over some kind of strange, mysterious looking trees. And both of them had a fairly strong narrative and expressionist kind of flavor with distortions of form. I didn't understand them and I had no real context for them. But they made an impression on me as an early teenager. In high school, I took art classes. And didn't really seem to be able to do much else. Wasn't very good and interested in academics. And so I spent as much time as I could in the art room. My art teacher was a Japanese-American woman named Annie Lowery. And she encouraged me to sort of dive deeper into 00:03:00 visual art. And I hung out with several other art students. And we were sort of the art crowd at the time in the high school. There was one other kind of seminal thing, I think, that took place in high school. We took a bus trip, it was actually a science-related bus trip. But we stopped in this little town called Lindsborg, Kansas. And it was kind of a side trip on the main trip. And we stopped at this little school called Bethany College. And we went into the Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery. And it just seemed like a really nice place. And I was kind of thinking about possibly going to college for art and didn't really look at any other schools. And that day at Bethany had sort of made an impression on me. My art teacher encouraged me to go there. And 00:04:00 that's kind of how I wound up there. SL: And how old were you when you visited Bethany College? JL: Oh, I was probably either a junior in high school or maybe the first semester senior year. It was just about the time you start thinking about going to college. And I had sort of decided that maybe that would be what I'd do, but I hadn't really done any research or looked around at all. And this little trip sort of accidentally put me there. Sort of was the reason I wound up going to Bethany. SL: And what classes did you take in high school? What kinds of art classes? Did you do any printmaking, for example? JL: I did, actually, do a little tiny bit of silkscreen printing in high school. They would do posters for the theatrical productions at the high school. And sometimes I would help out making these posters. I remember cleaning the 00:05:00 screens a lot more than [unclear]. (laughter) Other than that, you know, I probably was taught some relief printing. I don't really remember doing it. But it was mostly drawing and painting kind of courses that I took. You know, I don't know that there was much art history or anything. It was just sort of come to the art room, kind of hang out and do some stuff. That's sort of how it kind of worked for me. It was just the place that I felt comfortable, compared to some more academic kind of pursuits that I would be asked to do in other classes. SL: Sure. And then, how did you prepare for applying to Bethany College? Did you get any help from your teachers or your family? JL: Probably my teacher gave me some advice about it. I don't 00:06:00 really remember too much about it. Like my folks had no idea about what any of this was about. Going to college was just something you did after high school. But art was not on their radar screen. So they were very accommodating. Looking back on it, I'm kind of amazed that they let me go with so little research into it, and so little prospects related to it. But basically they think that if I was interested, then that would be okay. Even though they didn't understand it, they let me go. That was the only school I applied to. I didn't apply to any other school. So they seemed to think that that was okay, too, and that's how I wound up there. SL: And what was Bethany College like when you got there? JL: Well, Bethany's in this cute little Swedish immigrant community in central Kansas. It's kind of a tourist destination. It has several art galleries, or had several art galleries in town, and quite a number of gift shops for people that would come to town, and like the sort of Swedish gift products. Lots of orange Dala horses, everybody had a Dala horse on their front door, their address sort of marker. SL: Can you describe, I'm sorry, can you describe what those horses are? JL: A Dala horse? SL: Yes. JL: Dala is a particular part of Sweden, apparently. And a Dala horse is kind of a silhouette shape of a horse. They're almost always painted bright orange, with a little bit of sort of floral kind of tole painting on them, too. You would see them 00:07:00 everywhere in town. It was sort of the mascot of the town. SL: Okay. Thank you. JL: Yeah. And Bethany is a small, four-year liberal arts college. It has a fairly strong music and art background. A lot of education majors would go there, especially art education majors. They only had four faculty members in art while I was there. And they did a lot of, everybody taught art history. And then there was a ceramicist and a painter and a sculptor and a photographer who also taught drawing. The majority of the people that went there in the art program were art history, or education majors. Everybody had to take a printmaking course. That was just part of the general curriculum. It was kind of a combination relief and intaglio class. Printmaking I. Everybody took it and most people just didn't like it and went right back to the ceramics studio. But I kind of liked how it worked. I liked the kind of mechanics of printmaking and the 00:08:00 idea of being able to break it down into a series of very specific jobs that added up to a print. I liked the idea of multiples, having an edition. And the whole thing sort of made sense to me. The other thing about that course was the print shop was almost always empty, because everybody else would be hanging out down in the ceramics studio, or maybe in the painting studio. So I could sort of camp out in there and have the place more or less so myself. Another student that was there at the time was a guy named Ray Troll. And he and I were pretty good friends. We were basically the two printmakers. And I was the first printmaker to graduate there with a printmaking concentration in like ten years. It just was not on anybody else's radar screen. But Ray and I would hang out in there and we sort of had our own little thing going in printmaking. That seemed to be different than what everybody else was doing. That's partly why I think I got into it is that it was not being done by everybody else. SL: And can you talk a 00:09:00 little bit about your teacher for printmaking there? JL: Yeah. The faculty member who taught printmaking was named Bob Bosco. And Bob was primarily a painter. Somewhat of a photographer, too. And he taught printmaking, I think, mostly because it was required of him to teach it. He did a good job. And he certainly instilled in me a kind of an interest in it. But it was not his primary studio practice. He was mostly a painter. And his work varied quite a bit over the four years that I was there. So I think that there was a certain amount of just sort of getting through teaching those classes for him. But it was not something he was super excited about, maybe. But like I say, whatever he did, it certainly instilled in me a certain interest in the process. That's where I got it was from Bob. SL: And what did he think of your interest and concentration on printmaking? JL: What did he think about it? SL: Yeah. Did he ever say anything to you about, like because you were doing something different from other students? JL: I think he appreciated that he had this little two-person cadres of printmakers that were more interested in it than anybody else. So looking back on it, I probably thought I was pretty hot stuff. (laughter) I wasn't one of these people that were just there to learn how to do art education involving teaching art. I was a real artist. (laughs) Who made important art, I thought. And so I think that he also kind of thought that well, these two guys are kind of interesting, and they're doing things that are a little bit different than what the majority of the students were doing. And so he seemed to really encourage us. And we hung around outside 00:10:00 of class time, too, quite a bit. He was an early mentor for me that certainly made an impact on me at the time. SL: And how did you decide to go on from there and get your master's, and go to UW Madison? JL: Well, after I graduated, I hung around in Lindborg for another couple of years. I lived in a kind of a really low-rent apartment up above the hardware store. And I had a studio in kind of a cement block building on the alley behind the bakery that they laughingly called "the garden apartment." I made screen prints. I built my own equipment and had a fairly productive couple of years making screen prints in that studio. I also helped run a coop gallery in town that I showed in, and we had a couple shows there. And I had some shows other places in the area. And then I also worked fulltime for a four-color cattle publishing magazine. Publishing company that printed a magazine called the Simmental Shield. And the Simmental is a large breed of Swiss cattle. Almost a boutique kind of imported kind of cattle. So I did paste-up and layout work for them every day, fulltime. And I would do, I'd also draw pictures of 00:11:00 bulls and pigs and stuff that would show up in these magazines. And I also worked part time for a while at the Birger Sandzen Museum on campus as a janitor. So I was just hanging out in town there, working, trying to sort of build a portfolio of work up. And I started thinking that I probably should go to graduate school. I had no idea where to go. I got very little kind of input from people at the school about that kind of thing. But I did talk to a visiting artist that came there after I graduated but while I was still in town. I went and heard his lecture. And I talked to him a little bit afterwards and he kind of mentioned that Madison, University of Wisconsin, Madison, was a strong printmaking school. But more than that, I happened on a copy of Art News 00:12:00 magazine, probably in 1976 or '77, that had an image of a color etching by Warrington Colescott on the cover, and an article about a printmaking exhibition he was in of contemporary print artists at the Brooklyn Museum. The image on the cover was from his history of printmaking series. And it was a print of William Stanley Hayter inventing viscosity printing. And I was really taken with it. I loved the narrative and expression of style. And I thought to myself, this is what I want to do. The article mentioned that he taught at UW Madison. And so I applied there, along with a few other Midwest universities, to the MFA program. SL: And can you talk a little bit about finding out that you got in? JL: Well, you know, I put together work that I'd been doing in my little cement block sheds of a studio. I'd been working on kind of a series of prints and drawings that had a kind of a figure that wore a mask with a really long, pointy nose. Sort of a Punch clown figure. And he would cavort around in the moonlight and rode a dog through the sky. It was this whole sort of little personal mythological thing that I started 00:13:00 to invent. The prints I made were mostly screen prints. And I would often approach the process by laying down some flat colors through paper stencils. And then I would do a photo screen over the top that I would make by drawing with a grease pencil on some acetate, and then scratching back through that. So the final run was printed over the top had this kind of scratched, carved look that looked a lot like relief prints on old woodcuts or linoleum cuts. And that was a lot of what I had in my portfolio that I applied to school with. When I heard back from Madison, I was real excited. And I heard from several other schools. So in probably '78, I guess, maybe, '77, maybe, I took a trip and drove around to look at different schools. And I had an old Datsun pickup truck. And I'd sleep in the back of the truck at night as I'd check out 00:14:00 different schools. And when I came into Madison, I was dazzled by the school and by the town. There was so much energy going on there, and there were so many students everywhere I looked. There was so much going on. And it was so different than anyplace else I had visited. I pretty quickly after I pulled into town that I went to the art department, I pretty much made up my mind, this is where I'm going to go. I met Ray Gloeckler, who teaches- taught relief print there. And Ray had been one of the people who had voted for accepting me based on my application. And I came to find out later on that the screen prints that I had included in my portfolio, he thought were relief prints. So maybe I got in by mistake. (laughter) Ray toured me around and I really enjoyed talking with him. It all sort of added up to this is the place that I should go. SL: Did you get a chance to talk to any of the current students in the program while you were visiting? JL: I think I did. Can't quite remember now, but I saw a lot going on. Saw all the facilities. There were just so many print studios all lined up all down the hall. And there was such great facilities, and there seemed to be so much energy going on there. So many print students. At the time, there were, I have no idea how many grad students in printmaking were there, but it just seemed like there were tons. And on this trip, at Madison, was the first time I'd saw any kind of book arts. I had no experience with book arts at all, prior to this. I 00:15:00 didn't know anything about it. I had no idea that people, individual regular people, could make books. I thought books came from factories. So when I was there, though, I saw these books, student books, in showcases in the hallway and was struck by how interesting they were and how they just looked totally different than anything else I'd ever seen. So that was my first exposure to book arts. SL: And when you started school, then, what kinds of classes did you start out taking? JL: Well my first year at UW, Warrington Colescott, who was the main reason I wanted to go there, was on sabbatical. (laughs) Things always worked out that way. So I took relief prints with Ray Gloeckler, which I probably would have anyway. I took etching with Warrington's replacement, David Becker, from Detroit, who's a wonderful etcher. Kind of a very, totally different stylistically than Warrington. Very intense, kind of moody surrealist, figurative kind of work. And I took litho with Jack Damer. I'd never done litho before, 00:16:00 because Bethany College didn't have any litho. So that first semester I took litho with Jack. I didn't really get that much out of litho. I didn't really like it all that well. It seemed a little reproductive to me. But I made one litho that I really liked. I rolled up a litho stone just flat black and processed it. And then I scratched an image back into it with a stylus. So it was like making a relief print. And I really liked the print and I submitted it to Boston Printmakers North American Juried Exhibition, won an award of some paper from the 00:17:00 Strathmore Paper Company. And that was a kind of an interesting thing that happened that year. Even though I didn't continue doing any litho, that one print sort of seemed to have some impact on things. My wife and I got married in 1978 and we moved to Madison for me to go to school. We lived in an apartment on Washington Street just up from the old train station. And then I would bike to work every day, or to school every day. And my wife worked at a health cooperative in town. And so I'd be down to school all day and then come home, and usually go back in the evening. There were so many really strong print students there. There was a lot of 00:18:00 competition. And I sort of felt like I had to step up my game and push myself to even sort of get noticed. In the second semester of my first year, I took a papermaking class with Walter Hamady. That was the first time I dealt with Walter. And I was not all that excited about the process. Once I learned how to make paper, it sort of let a little like just a sort of a craft thing. Partly because I didn't really have, the paper I was making didn't really work for the prints I was making, so I didn't really have a use for it. So I just sort of felt like I was just going through the motions and making this paper. But like I said, it was my first exposure to Walter. And he certainly made a strong impression on me with his personality and his presence. SL: Can you talk a little bit- JL: I continued to make-no, go ahead. SL: I'm sorry to 00:19:00 interrupt you. I was just going to ask you if you could talk a little bit more about that. JL: About Walter, or about papermaking? SL: Yeah, what you mean by his presence impressed you, that kind of thing. What was he like in class? JL: Walter is just an amazing, mercurial, strong presence. His sense of who he is and what he does just sort of radiates out from him. And it's pretty hard to not be influenced by him. He likes to talk. He likes to talk about himself and he likes to talk about the things he's interested in. And his teaching style is pretty much just this kind of running monologue of how, of the things that he's interested in and what he thinks students should be interested in. And just sort of sitting there listening to him talk about his world and his family. At the time he had two young twins and a slightly older daughter. And we learned all about everything that was going on in his family, everything 00:20:00 that was going on down at the farm where his press and his paper mill was. And projects that he was involved in, the people he was collaborating with. He was constantly discussing different writers and different type designers and people he had connections with. He just sort of seemed to built the whole world, for me, anyway, that was totally new to me, but something that I knew I really wanted to be involved in. And even though this papermaking class didn't really click that much, and it was mostly just because, like I said, I didn't really have a use for the paper, it seemed like I was just going through the motions, Walter certainly made an important impact on me. I continued to make wood and linoleum cuts with Ray Gloeckler and make some etchings. But I sort of hadn't really gotten into any kind of a groove as a grad student 00:21:00 yet. However I met another grad student early on who had a studio in the same building I did. I was in the University Avenue studio, it's a storefront sort of studio. I'm not sure if it's even there anymore. There were a number of us in this building. And this particular guy, John Bennett, had already, he'd done his undergraduate work at UW. And had also worked with Ray Gloeckler, and had worked with Walter Hamady. And he made books. He'd um, moved into the graduate program. He'd been making books with Walter, and wood engravings with Ray Gloeckler. He had his own Vandercook proofing press in his studio, and he had type in there. And 00:22:00 I watched him as he made books under his press name, which is Gardyloo Press. SL: And did you end up using his press at all? I know sometimes students would use other presses, or sometimes they would just use the ones in the classroom. JL: Well at the time, I still hadn't made any books. I was still just doing single-sheet prints. And I was using the equipment in the main building. But in that second, '79, second semester of my first year there, John Bennett commissioned me to do a book of linoleum cuts in collaboration with him. So it was his book, but it was my imagery. This was called In the Apartment. And I designed and cut the images. And I wrote short dialog captions that would go under the prints. And John set the type and did the 00:23:00 printing, and helped with the printing. And we actually used the paper from this Strathmore Paper Award that I had won the previous semester for the bulk of the edition. SL: Oh, okay. JL: And it was perfect. The book format was perfect for the sort of narrative approach to imagery that I was making. And from that time on, I was hooked on the book format. SL: So then did you take some book making classes? JL: Yeah. In my second year I started working with Hamady in his typography classes. And I made letterpress broadsides and books. The first, Walter's first project is a folded, or was a folded broadside. And I made a broadside about my dog. Various brushes with death. SL: Oh, no. (laughter) JL: And then I, later in the semester, I produced my own, my first book of my own. It was called The Illustrated Goose. And it was kind of a warped series of nursery rhymes with histories of each of the nursery rhymes. They were color linoleum cuts. My work had a tendency to look a little bit different than most of the other students. Walter's influence on people was so strong that a lot of the other students' work had a kind of a 00:24:00 Hamady look. SL: Okay. JL: And my stuff didn't. It just sort of looked different. I think it was because of my sort of printmaking background. And I kind of backed into the whole affair. And so the format made perfect sense to me, to be able to hook together a bunch of narrative images in one option, to have this kind of sequential relationship from one image to the next. But it was mostly sort of image-based rather than text-based. My texts were sort of minimal, and I'm not what I consider to be a masterful typographer. But the use of letterpress was certainly something that I found interesting and enjoyed doing. I loved the letterpress quality of how type bites into the paper, and setting the type by hand, and handling the type and moving it around. I got into all that kind of stuff. But it was always at the service of some kind of pictorial image, rather than coming at it from sort of a text, and maybe adding an image or two. 00:25:00 But images were the major thing. SL: And how did you come up with the concept for Illustrated Goose? JL: Could you say that again? SL: How did you come up with the concept for The Illustrated Goose? JL: Oh, concept. Well, I don't know. I'm trying to remember now. I was looking around for something that had sort of, it was kind of a series of something that I wouldn't have to work with an author on, or find somebody to write something. It was something I could build myself. And I guess I'd been looking at nursery rhymes. I've always liked that kind of thing. Folklore and mythology and nursery rhymes kind of fall under that category. And so, I think I'd probably been looking at various nursery rhyme books at the time and decided yeah, I think I can take off on this and find my own version of it. So I remember going into 00:26:00 Memorial Library and spending a bunch of time looking at nursery rhyme books and histories of nursery rhymes at the time. So I selected some things that made some visual imagery for me, with my brain, and sort of played with that. Made these linoleum cuts and countered that with the nursery rhyme, but then a little history of some of what's behind in the particular nursery rhyme. SL: Yeah. I think it was a really interesting approach to the stories. What about, I guess, you would have had a final show, right, as part of your MFA program. Could you talk a little bit about that? JL: Yes. In the next semester, I was working with Walter Hamady. I printed another book called The Seven Deadly Sins. Which again was a linoleum cut book, and it had a sin 00:27:00 per page spread. (laughs) It had all kinds of fold outs and fold outs and it was kind of a similar thing to what I'd done with The Illustrated Goose. And I'd been making some single-sheet prints. Warren Colescott had come back from sabbatical. And I worked with him in etching, and made some color etchings, and got involved in multiple plate etchings and doing a lot of selective wiping. But I had already been sort of seduced into book arts at that point, so my single-sheet print production had fell off quite a bit, because I was putting so many images into each of these books. So by the time my MFA show rolled around, I had mostly books to show. And then I sort of spread them out in mats on the wall in addition to the actual books you could 00:28:00 see beyond just the opening spread of a particular book. And I had some drawings and some single-sheet prints as well. My work has pretty much coalesced into a somewhat satirical narrative kind of narrative style. Very much coming out of sort of German expressionism. That sort of slight distortion of figures, and very compressed sort of compositions, where things were sort of packed into really small spaces. And it came through quite a bit in the work that I had in my MFA show. And so it's mostly books with a few, with some other single-sheet prints. SL: Do you remember how many books you made while you were here? JL: Really just those two. I came into it in my second year. And so it was just those two that I did while I was at Madison. SL: And can you talk a little bit more about how you came up with the idea for Seven Deadly Sins? JL: Again, I think I was sort of shopping around for something that didn't require working with some author. A lot of the other book students, they either knew people who wrote poetry or they shopped around and found authors who would work with them. I just didn't seem to operate in that way. I guess I didn't have as much literary kind of bend as a lot of the other students did. And so I tended to look for something that had a kind of a more pictorial kind of base, and something that seemed to have its own kind of set of conditions, like the Seven Deadly Sins. Something that was already sort of a known quantity that I could then kind of riff on in my own way. And so I think sin is always more interesting than virtue. (laughs) I mean, most people find it a little more interesting. So there are places to go with it. So the images were pretty satirical. I used the format of the book structure a little bit more in that production. When I got to gluttony, the format size needed to expand beyond the footprint of the 00:29:00 book. So it folds up and it folds out into this sort of really large, gluttonous sort of figure. And there's all kinds of sort of disgusting food that he's sort of sitting on. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, that section of the book has its own, there's a foldout that goes the other direction, too, so there's actually two images associated with gluttony. Gluttony sort of seemed to be the epitome of sin, excess. More and more and more. And I did write an introduction for that book. Actually, I think I probably wrote one for The Illustrated Goose, too. But I wrote an introduction for Seven Deadly Sins in the guise of a sort of a Bible-thumping preacher that talks about sin and how prevalent it is in everybody's life. And almost, it's very satirical. SL: And how did your fellow students react to your satirical books? 00:30:00 Since they were so different from what they were doing, perhaps? JL: Well, they seemed to go over pretty well. I was in a really choice group of people the couple of years that I was in Madison. The cover paper was handmade by Kathy Kuehn, a really important, who has gone on to become an important printmaker and printer and book artist in her own right. She was Walter's shop assistant at the time. Walter Tisdale was one of my classmates and good friends. Barbara Tetenbaum was another one in that class. Jim Escalante went on to teach at UW for a long time, was in that group. Sheila Webb and Rick Zauft and Chuck Alexander, it was a really good group of type and book arts people that I found myself amongst. There was a lot of competition, healthy competition amongst us all. And we kind of helped each other out with printing, and we were a 00:31:00 real cohesive group that happened to be there at that particular time that I think, certainly for me, was seminal in the formation of my career as an artist. SL: I know you've continued to work with some of them, too, after you left Madison. Could you talk a little bit about Blue Moon Press, how you came up with that name? JL: Yeah. I remember it very clearly. I was late at night working in the paper mill, was making paper for, I think it was making paper for the In the Apartment book that I did with John Bennett. The end sheets were handmade, and the book was hard cover, cased in, but we had those kind of handmade paper that I printed some tulip wallpaper pattern on. And I was probably making that really late at night. And I remember sitting in the doorway of the old Johnson Street paper mill. It was in the basement. Pretty grim facility at the 00:32:00 time. But it was very serviceable and we all used it. And I remember sitting there looking, while pulp was beating in the Hollander beater, sitting in the doorway looking out into the night. It was a full moon at the time. We were kind of encouraged to come up with a press name. But it wasn't something that was mandatory or anything, but we all sort of felt like that was something that we should do to sort of create this identity as printers and as book artists. And so I was looking at the full moon. And I thought Full Moon Press would capture the idea of something rare or uncommon. And it had a kind of certainly, a certain kind of mysterious sound. I also always liked the old song Blue Moon by the Marcelles. And the old country song Blue Moon of Kentucky keep on shining. Both those songs were things I remember from the time. I thought well, this sounds like it might be a good name for me. And it seemed to sum up how I approached my book 00:33:00 work. Kind of doing something sinister every once in a blue moon. And it's been a good description of my work ever since. SL: Would you like to stop here, or would you like to continue on? JL: Well, I think that on your list, that's kind of where we sort of said we'd stop. SL: Yeah. JL: So good place to stop. SL: Okay. Thank you. 48:20 End First Interview Session. Second Interview Session (June 22, 2018): Digital File SL: Today is Friday, June 22, 2018. I'm Sarah Lange with the Oral History Program at UW Madison. I'm talking with Jim Lee, book artist, UW alum, and founder of Blue Moon Press. I'm at the University Archives in Steenbock Library and Jim is in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Jim, last time we were talking about your time at the UW. And this time I know we wanted to kind of start with you moving away from Madison. And I know that you first, your first stop was in Manitoba. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that? JL: Sure. When I was at the UW I met a couple of people who were there. One was Diana Thorneycroft, who is Canadian. And she was taking a degree at university doing printmaking. And her husband, Bill Pura, was along with her. He wasn't enrolled, but he was on sabbatical. He taught at University of Manitoba, and he'd come along, too. And I met them both. And about the time I finished up, they were finishing up, too. And there happened to be a 00:34:00 job opening in printmaking as a sabbatical replacement in a part time kind of position first that had been turned into a sabbatical replacement at the University of Manitoba. They asked me if I was interested in applying and I said, oh, you bet. So I went up and interviewed and got the job. That was probably one of the reasons why I left UW after two years, because I had this job that came up. So my wife and I drove up there with all our belongings. And amazingly somehow there was a glitch with the immigration business so that I didn't have the right papers when I got, so we had to wait for two weeks. It was kind of a weird snafu as we were leaving town. So eventually the people from Manitoba called down and said, "Okay, we've gotten everything straightened out, so now you can come up." so we were driving up through the wilds of North Dakota towards the border hoping there was the immigration papers sitting there waiting for us in the middle of nowhere there when we got to the border. And yes, lo and behold, they were there. So we were able to- SL: Jim- JL: --go ahead and move in up there in Winnipeg, Manitoba. SL: Where were you waiting for the paperwork to come through? Were you waiting in Madison or somewhere else? JL: No, actually, no, I had given up my studio. This is like a really sad, it's almost like a cartoon. It's kind of a sad story. We'd given up our apartment. I'd given 00:35:00 up my studio. I had just loaded everything into the U-Haul truck and pulled the door down. And my wife came down from the apartment and said, "They're calling from Winnipeg and they said, 'Don't come. We don't have the paperwork. It hasn't gone through yet.'" So we had nowhere to go. We'd already given up our apartment. So I stuck all of my belongings in John Bennett's studio, in an extra sort of little studio space on University Avenue. And then we drove to my wife's parents' house in Kansas City and stayed there for a couple of weeks until we found out that the paperwork had gone through. And so then we drove back to Madison and picked all of our stuff up in a different U-Haul truck and drove out to Winnipeg. And it went through with no problems. But it was kind of a rocky start to 00:36:00 this adventure going to Canada. SL: Yeah. How did your wife feel about that, too? I mean, how did both of you feel? But what was her situation as well with the-I don't know, was she working? Or was she- JL: She technically wasn't able to do any work in Canada. I was the only one who had a work visa. SL: Okay. JL: And so she did some babysitting at the home, kind of under the table. We were only there for two years. And I was only technically allowed to work for the University of Manitoba. I did teach a couple of workshops at the local museum. But like I couldn't even just go get a job at a McDonald's or deliver pizzas or anything like that, technically. So it was two years of me working at the university teaching relief print, and I taught a book arts class. They had actually a pretty nice letterpress shop with a Vandercook proofing press all set up where I could just walk in and start printing, and start teaching that class there. And then the second year, the etching instructor, Arnold Saper, went on sabbatical. So I took over his etching classes and taught fulltime. I was part time the first year, and fulltime the second year. SL: Okay. JL: Amazingly, they gave me this whole house as a studio. It was kind of a house that was right on the edge of campus. And so I was able to, a friend had a press that she wasn't using, and so I was able to install that. And it was just an etching 00:37:00 press in this house. And I worked out of that studio. And did mostly etchings at that period. One of the last pieces I did in Madison was invented this sort of mythological character named Mr. Fox. And Mr. Fox sort of, my wife came home one day and was talking about, she's an education major and taught school before we got married, elementary school. And she was talking about a children's game called What Time is it, Mr. Fox? Which is kind of a blind man's bluff sort of game. And I kind of thought of that phrase, what time is it, Mr. Fox, and thought it was kind of mysterious and poetic. Who is Mr. Fox and why are we asking him what time it is? And so I invented this character that has to do with time. And over the years, I've sort of embellished it and it kind of grew in my mind as what he was all about. But basically when I talk about him, I usually say that when I go into the studio, it's like nine o'clock in the 00:38:00 morning. And all of a sudden I turn around, it's five o'clock. Well, Mr. Fox has been at work. Steals my time away from me. And there's studio time and then there's time the rest of the world. They're not the same thing. And it all had to do with Mr. Fox. So one of the books that I, well, a series of prints when I was at University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. But I did this book called Stitch in Time, which was the first book I did after I got out of school. And it's all about Mr. Fox. It's a book of etchings that are printed bleed, so they stand off all the edges, and have text printed onto the images in some cases. In other cases, they have transparent or translucent rice paper pages. So I was trying to kind of use the time-based format of the book to get at the idea of time. You can sort of see through some of the pages, looking into the future as you page through the book. Just like any book, you start to 00:39:00 stack up the past over on the left hand side. And I like the idea of being able to sort of see into the future and have that sort of sense of time as something that's built into the format. So that book was printed in, oh, 1981, I think. SL: I think I have it 1982, maybe? Does that sound right? JL: Well, I think it is actually '81 when I actually did the printing of it. SL: Okay. JL: And it's actually one of my favorite books because it's sort of, like I say, the time-based medium of the book format is sort of inherent to the idea of the book. SL: Jim, your talking about etching reminds me that I wanted to ask you, last time you mentioned that you wanted to go to Madison because Warrington Colescott was teaching. And then he was on 00:40:00 sabbatical. Did you ever end up getting to take a class with him? JL: I did. Yeah. He came back my second year and I took a couple of classes with him. You know, he certainly was a mentor, and I learned an awful lot of interesting technical things from Warrington, as well as just the sense of sort of being a print artist. We were all sort of in awe of Warrington. (laughs) And he would have us come out to his farm, his studio, outside of town. And just his layout and how he operated. He was married to Fran Myers. And she was a wonderful artist, print artist, in her era, but she also did a lot of printing for him and they collaborated together on his work. And it was just such a wonderful lifestyle that he embodied, that was probably one of the major things that I remember and got from working with Warrington. I actually had Warrington come up to University of Wisconsin my second year as a visiting artist. Everybody was equally impressed when he came up there. SL: Where did he come? JL: Up to the University of, I'm sorry, University of Manitoba. SL: Okay. Okay. Interesting. JL: Yeah. I had him come up as a visiting artist up there. SL: And what was it like having him there? Like did you kind of show him around? JL: Oh, yeah. You know, there were various social gatherings, as well as his lectures and I think he did some kind of a little demonstration sort of thing. But it was mostly him sort of discussing his work 00:41:00 with the students. And I had prepped them really well. Because again, I had just come from there. And so I was full of stories and enthusiasm at the time for Warrington. So when he was there, they were all primed for him coming. SL: Mm hmm. And what were your students like there? I mean, how many students were studying? I mean, you said you were teaching some book arts classes and printing. JL: Mm hmm. SL: Could you talk a little bit more about the students who were there? JL: Students were really good. It's a provincial university, and Winnipeg is a really nice city. Fairly large city. And the students came from, mostly from Manitoba. There were some who came from a little bit further away, like Montreal and Toronto. But mostly they were people from the area. And they worked really hard. They really cared about their work. They were very 00:42:00 conscientious about doing things. I got on real well with them. I taught, actually now that I think about it, I taught silk screen, too. I think that's mainly what I was, I was hired to teach relief and silk screen the first year. And then I taught, in addition to those, I taught intaglio in the second year. And then I forget which year I did the book arts class. I only taught it once. It must have been the second year, because I was fulltime the second year, probably that's what it was. There was one student in particular who did just amazing books with me. He went on to do a lot of photo reviewer, and moved out to Saint Johns in Newfoundland. He was a little bit older, so it was kind of nice having him in the classes, too. SL: Mm hmm. And 00:43:00 were you teaching undergraduate students? JL: Yes. There might have been a graduate program, but I don't think there was. I certainly didn't have any of the graduate students. SL: Okay. And how did you adjust to life in Manitoba? I mean, you had kind of a tricky start getting there. But what did you think of it while you were there? JL: Oh, it was great. It was the first time I'd lived outside of the US. And even though it was in Canada, there was still sort of a Midwest feel to it. It's sort of directly north of sort of the Midwest. So there was the same sort of attitude, I think, in people's minds. And they were just, sometimes I felt a little cut off from things that were going on in the US. And one of the things that was an issue, I understand why, but I was not able to apply for grants and things. There's a wonderful series of Canada Council grants that people all around me were getting. But I wasn't 00:44:00 eligible to apply, because I wasn't a Canadian citizen and didn't have landed immigrant status or anything like that. So I wasn't able to-there were things I just wasn't able to, opportunities I wasn't able to take a hold of. After a couple of years, it seemed like it was probably time to look for a job back in the States, just because I sort of felt like I was a little cut off. SL: Sure. And how did you start looking for a job in the States? JL: I applied to jobs through the College Art Association. And went to the conference, and applied to a number 00:45:00 of different places. The conference was in New York City. And I applied to, like I say, a number of places. But I got a couple of interviews, one of which was at the University of Hartford. And talked to people there at the conference, interviewed. They said, "You know, we really like you, but we would like you to do a second interview and come see the school. But there's no way we can fly you all the way out from Winnipeg." So they said, "If you are interested in doing this, you should get on a train and come up to Hartford from New York. Because we probably wouldn't be able to fly you out." So I rearranged my schedule and did that. And they toured me around. I met a bunch more people and showed them my work. That book that I made, A Stitch in Time, seemed to have a big impact on people at Hartford. They were kind of looking for somebody to sort of start doing some book arts things. There wasn't anything like that here at all at the time. And Fred Wessel was the printmaker. I interviewed with him and 00:46:00 a couple of other faculty members. And he was also kind of impressed that I'd gone to the University of Wisconsin and worked with Warrington and with Walter Hamady and had that sort of pedigree. And I think that sort of had a lot to do with them being interested in me. SL: So then how did that work out? You got the job. And was the job supposed to focus on the book arts a bit? Can you tell me a little bit more about the role like initially? JL: The job was a printmaking position, fulltime, tenure track printmaking position. But like I said, there wasn't any book arts courses being taught. So it was basically, I was being tired to teach etching and silk screen, primarily. And then also to teach in the foundation's program, teaching drawing. And so after a couple of years, I sort of figured out a way to kind of start teaching book arts. Kind 00:47:00 of snuck it into the program a little bit, along with some other things that they weren't really teaching yet. And sort of, so that's sort of how that evolved. SL: I'm sorry, just to clarify, are you talking about Hartford? Or are you talking about- JL: Hartford. I'm talking about, yes, I'm talking about Hartford. SL: Okay. And I'm curious, too, to know, you brought your book with you. Were you trying to sell books at all early on? JL: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Every time I could get a book in front of people, I would try to sell it. And whenever I would take a trip, I usually would try to line up some interviews with rare book dealers or rare book librarians to show them my stuff. I can't remember if I, I might have done something on that trip at the New York Public Library. I can't remember now. But since that time, almost anytime I would go somewhere, I would try to see if I could get somebody 00:48:00 interested in what I'm doing. SL: Sure. And can you tell us a little bit about your move to Hartford, then? JL: Well, so in 1982, in the summer, we moved out here. Drove out. And initially we moved directly to Hartford. Got an apartment and moved in. I would work, be able to do my work, my artwork, at school, in a back bedroom, or I would do drawing and sort of draw on plates and things. But I didn't have any printing equipment at home so I would go into the school, which was about a mile away, and use the facilities there. And I did, as I was doing in Winnipeg, I did a lot of etching and intaglio work. Mostly as single-sheet prints. I had sort of really got on kind of a roll while I was in Canada about working with the plates, and working them and working them, and scraping them out, reworking them. Trying to make them as rich as possible. So this series about Mr. Fox, there were single-sheet prints as well as the book. And that carried over to some of the first stuff that I did when I came out here to Hartford. And because I was so close to the school, I was able to spend a lot of time in the evenings and on weekends, working out of the print shop. But you know, the more you're there, the more, it's harder to sort of separate being the artist from being the teacher. SL: Sure. JL: So as time went on, I found it harder and harder to do. I didn't really have a studio at the school. In fact, when I was interviewing, like I said, in Canada they'd give me a whole house as a studio. So when I was interviewing at Hartford, I said, "So where's the studios?" And they all just kind of looked at each other and laughed, because there were no studios for faculty at Hartford. And so I was kind of spoiled by what I had in Winnipeg. And so I was just working out of the print shop. SL: And how did you like teaching at the University of Hartford? How was it different or similar to Manitoba? JL: Well, it's a little different, I think. East coast attitude is just a little different than Midwest attitude. And I think I had to, I'm kind of soft-spoken, I think, probably. And I sort of had to talk louder and faster and more emphatically to get people's attention and to hold their attention. And students didn't seem to just 00:49:00 really just want to immediately do what I wanted them to do. It's like I had to sort of talk them into it a little bit sometimes. And so it took a little bit of a learning curve about that when I got out here. And it still goes on, I think. I still have to sort of force, sometimes, force myself to be a little bit more, sort of push my agenda a little bit more with students than maybe what I used to have to do when I was living in the Midwest. But the art school was a wonderful place. And a wonderful history. It dates from 1877. It was one of, it was kind of an old art school that was first kind of a, met in the Wadsworth Athenaeum for a while, museum in Hartford. And went to various locations. And eventually it came together with some other area colleges to form the University of Hartford. But the Hartford Art School is a professional art school within the University of Hartford, and it certainly has the oldest history of any part of 00:50:00 the university. And it was a drawing and painting academy for a long time. And eventually different other departments have been added onto it. And it's a full-blown art school with pretty much everything that most people would want. The printmaking department has always had a couple of faculty. And like I said, Fred Wessel was the senior faculty. He taught litho and drawing. And then I taught etching and silk screen. Eventually I sort of snuck, for some reason nobody was teaching relief at all. And so I snuck some relief in, first as special topics and then it became a full-fledged course. And then I snuck book arts in and started to add that into the curriculum a little at a time. There was no book arts equipment, no type. There was an old press that, a number 219 Vandercook proofing press that was being used as a table top. SL: Oh. 00:51:00 (laughs) JL: Because nobody really wanted to use it for anything. And I eventually traded it for an SP15 that was much, because we didn't really have enough room for this big 219 anyway. And we used that for a long time. And then eventually I got another Vandercook, and I took the SP15 home. I traded it for one I bought. And I took the SP15 home, and I still use that today. SL: Can you talk a little bit about some of the books that you were making when you first, I guess, moved to Hartford? And I guess the other thing is how did you balance your-well, I'll let you answer that first. JL: Well, yeah. The first book I did when I was here in Hartford, let me think about this a second here. I did a series of kind of small scale books. Things that I, at the time, was calling barely a book. They were kind of like portfolios that might have a fold out accordion coming out of it. Or you would open the portfolio and there would be some pages that were kind of stacked up inside somehow. So I did a book called A Calling Out in 1984 that had a nursery rhyme printed in it on a sewn-in piece of rice paper into this multi-colored linoleum cut. These were really small editions. Ten, 15 copies, things like that. I did an accordion fold book called Candle in a Storm in 1986. That is kind of, being from Kansas, when I tell people I'm from Kansas, I usually get one of two comments. One is, "Wow, it's really flat out there." Or, it has something to do with the Wizard of Oz. So this book sort of had to do with tornadoes and trying to keep a candle lit in a storm that sort of, in a very tangential way sort of evolved out of the Wizard of Oz. my life is kind of like keeping a candle lit in a storm 00:52:00 sometimes. And this accordion is kind of a long, panoramic image, with this kind of whirlwind line work that came across it. And then also in '86, I did another of these kind of portfolio, barely a book kind of things called Mr. Invisible at Home. I have a tendency to invent these sort of characters, or these mythological figures, and kind of play with them a little bit in different ways. So I had invented this guy called Mr. Invisible who is around all the time, but nobody ever notices. (laughs) They don't see him. And so I'd done a couple of prints. I don't know if they were all that great, but eventually I decided to make a couple of book-like things that had to do with Mr. Invisible. And that was in '86. You want me to go on with more about my books? Or you want to talk about collaborations with other people? SL: It's up to you. What would you like to discuss first? JL: Well, you know, it might be interesting to talk about some of the collaborations. Because several of them came in this earlier time. SL: Okay. Great. JL: So in 1980, '81, when I was still in Winnipeg, Walter Hamady asked me to make some images for his papermaking book, Papermaking, A Book of Suspicions, which was a fairly major work about everything he knew about papermaking. So he asked me to make images that illustrated the technical aspects of papermaking, the molds and deckles and felts, couching. So I did linoleum cuts and then he made letterpress blocks based on the linoleum cuts. I was really excited about doing this, of course, because working with Walter as a student is one 00:53:00 thing, but working with him as a collaborator was a whole other thing. So I spent a lot of time making quite an images, some of which he rejected, some of which he told me, "Okay, change this, make this a little bit different." So things went through a lot of permutations. But in the end, I was very excited about printing this book through his Perishable Press Limited. And it went out to all over. Many, many libraries and collections. So that was one of the first collaborations that we did with other people. SL: Jim, were you corresponding through the mail then? Or over the phone? How did you- JL: Mostly mail. Walter is a voracious letter writer. He just writes letters constantly. And so, you know, I might get a couple of them every week. I would send him stuff and he would quickly dash a letter off back to me. So I don't know if I 00:54:00 ever talked to him on the phone about things or not. I might have. But it was mostly through mail. SL: Okay. JL: Then when I moved out here to Connecticut in 1983, Charles Alexander, at the time, his press was called Black Mesa Press, asked me to do some illustrations for a book he was doing called Captain Jack's Chaps, or Houston MLA by Edward Dorn. And I made five images, these were drawings, pen drawings that I sent him that he made letterpress line blocks, commercial line blocks for, printed in this edition. The text is about a Modern Language Association convention in Houston, Texas, and the various panels and different characters that appear at this conference. So I did these sort of satirical line drawings of like the Hyatt Hotel where the conference took place, and different people at their panels. They were printed in red, in this kind of rich red. And then Kathy Kuehn actually helped Chuck Alexander sew that edition. SL: Okay. JL: Then in 1986, I did a collaboration with Walter Tisdale, Tatlin Books. And Walter asked me to illustrate a book by Jesse Glass, Junior, called The Sleeper. It was one of my favorite things. It's a poem, one single poem, that is in a kind of a fold out kind of 00:55:00 construction that equates sleep with death. And he just wanted one image, because of the construction of the book he wanted this central image in the middle as this thing folded out. And I could think how to do it with lots of different images, but I could not come up with just one image that sort of summed up my feelings about this poem. And at the time, we'd bought a house in a little town called Newington, Connecticut. It's just a suburb of Hartford. And I remember being out in the backyard one day and I was cutting branches down and trimming the trees. And in order to get the trash to take the branches away, you've got to bundle them up. Then you can put them by the side of the road and the trash will take them away. So I was bundling up these branches and they start to look like arms and legs to me. And I started putting them together in these sort of scarecrow-like effigies, and tying them together, and just sort of having fun. It didn't have anything to do with art, it was just sort of something fun to do 00:56:00 when I should have been working on trimming these trees. But later on, I started thinking about it, and these sort of sticklike figures sort of started to take on a more important, more importance for me. And eventually I decided to start drawing them. And eventually this stick figure that's made out of bundles of sticks evolved. And that became the image that was used in The Sleeper. And there's a linoleum cut that I sent Walter Tisdale and he printed that linoleum cut. It worked out really well. I liked that production a lot. But it also, I went on to do a whole series of prints and drawings of stick figures, of figures made out of bundles of sticks. Effigies and about two years' worth of single-sheet prints and drawings based on that same series of stuff that came from that collaboration with Walter Tisdale. In 1992, Barb 00:57:00 Tetenbaum, who had taken over the Silver Buckle Press, the director of Silver Buckle Press at the Memorial Library. John Bennett had been the director, and then I think Walter was the director for a while. And then Barb took over. She contacted me about being involved in a production that they were doing called a printer's exquisite corpse. Which is an exquisite corpse project where each, I think there were 30, 32, something like that, different artists--letterpress printer and print makers. And each artist was assigned a section of the body. The head or the torso or the sort of pelvis, legs, feet section. And we were to produce cards on a certain size that would begin and end at certain points on the figure. And an edition, I think it was 100. And there had to be some letterpress involved in relief. But letterpress somehow. And I was assigned the head section. So I thought about it for a while, and eventually I decided to do a portrait head of Sigmund Freud. And I figured he's messed around with our heads (SL laughs) for a long time. I thought maybe I should do the same for him. So I produced this color reduction woodcut of Sigmund Freud's head that went into this amazingly beautiful box that was constructed by Booklab down in Austin, Texas, I think, with little compartments for each of the parts that line up to produce the figure. And you can mix and match them in any way you want. And there were a whole of really wonderful letterpress artists in there, including a lot of old 00:58:00 Wisconsinites. Kathy Kuehn and Walter Tisdale and Jim Escalante. A lot of people in that portfolio. SL: Did you trade ideas with anybody? Or did you all kind of work on your own and then you just saw everything when it came together? JL: Yeah. We were, well, I didn't talk to anybody about it. In fact, I think that's sort of the premise of the thing. You don't know what other people are doing. And so the whole figure is made out of these images that you don't know what they're going to look like until you see them all together. So it was a real surprise to see what other people had done. They did one later on called an Exquisite Horse- SL: Yes. JL: --that was just two panels, as opposed to the three horizontal panels. But it was a great little project to be involved in. Then in 1999, Walter Hamady asked me to collaborate with 00:59:00 him on a book called Whitman Sampler. Printed through his Perishable Press. It's a story by Richard Wiley about a family in Japan in the late 19th century when Commodore Perry is trying to sort of open Japan to the rest of the world for trade. And so I did four multi-block color woodcuts in sort of a Japanese Ukiyo-e sort of style. And it's really one of my favorite collaborations I've done with anybody. I like the way it came out, I like what Walter did with it. I like the story a lot. I cut the blocks and proofed them here. And they were like three or four blocks per image. And then I sent Walter proofs along with the blocks, and little recipes for how to mix the inks, and draw down some of the colors so they could match them. And after a couple of weeks, I got a package in the mail. And it was a letter that said, "I cannot match these colors." And the box had small quarter-sized containers, like quarter-sized Mason jar containers. It said, "You mix the inks. Put them in the jars and send them back to me." (laughter) So I did. And he used those inks to print the book. The title page is an image of, sort of a harbor with a sort of steamship in the harbor. Then there's several other images. And then after he printed the initial images with each of the blocks in place, he started to play around a little bit with the blocks, and just print sections of the images in very transparent colors with the text coming down all over them. So they become sort of abstract. And how the blocks are taken out of context and reused through the back end of the book. And it's just a beautiful production, and I was very proud to be involved with Walter. In 2003, I did another 01:00:00 book with Walter Hamady called Depression Dog, by Toby Olson. This was a story of people, it's a section of a much larger novel. But it's a story of people kind of uprooted and wandering around during the Depression in the '30s. But it's all seen through the eyes of a dog. And so I did several images based on different parts of the text and sent them to him. They were woodcuts. And in the end, he only used one. I think the other images sort of ended up on the cutting room floor. There were three other artists in that book, though, Henrik Drescher, Peter Sis and David McLimans. So I think it's a really wonderful book. The image they used of mine is a kind of a landscape image. Kind of a snowy landscape image that sets the sort of timeframe and sets the time of year for the story. Those are pretty much the collaborations I've done with other people. SL: Sure. Well speaking of landscapes, some of your other books include Prince of Landscapes. And I wonder, is that something that is, are you particularly drawn to creating those kinds of prints? Or is it more that the work is kind of dictating how you illustrate it? JL: Well, prior to moving out here to the east coast, landscape was not on my radar screen at all. It was just not something I was interested in. But when I moved out here, coming from the Midwest, which has such open sort of space, I felt very claustrophobic here for a number of years. There's just so many trees. You're just so closed in, you can't 01:01:00 see around the curve on the roads. You can't see very far. In the fall, it's beautiful. And when the leaves fall off the trees, you can see further. But I just had a very different sense of the land when I moved out here. But I moved from the Westside of Hartford over to the Eastside, across the Connecticut River, in about 1990. Bought a house in this little town called Glastonbury. So I would drive across the Connecticut River on a couple of different bridges almost daily. And that was where I had kind of a long vista. I could see much further. And I would watch the river, and I would watch what's going on along the shoreline through 01:02:00 different seasons. And over the course of a couple of years, I got very interested in the landscape, and I started looking at more landscape art. And started to sort of dabble with things having to do with landscape. And in '93, I took a sabbatical. And the sabbatical project was to drive along the Connecticut River and document various locations, and do drawings and work based on the Connecticut River. So I spent the fall driving up and down the 410-mile length of the Connecticut River, from Connecticut all the way to the Canadian border. The Connecticut River sort of forms in a series of small ponds and lakes that kind of dribble out of Canada right at the border. And it's a very narrow, you could throw a rock across the Connecticut River very easily up north. And as it flows south, it gets wider and wider and slower. And it kind of forms a sort of liquid spine down the west of New England. It forms a border between New Hampshire and Vermont. It splits Massachusetts in two, and then more or less splits Connecticut in two. So I did a series of drawings on site. Mostly pastel. Pastel has sort of become my color medium. I never considered myself a painter. I never really felt like I got a very good hold on how paint works, and a brush was never my favorite tool. But a stick, like charcoal or pastel or pencil or 01:03:00 something that has kind of a hard point has always been my favorite kind of tool. And so pastel became sort of my color medium. And so I just would drive along the river and find some site that I really liked and sit down and draw and spend several hours drawing, and then pack it up and drive some more. And over the course of that fall, I just made a whole lot of work about the Connecticut River. When then extended on into the spring. And by the end of that year, I was pretty enamored with the river, and decided that maybe I should do a book that was based on the river. And these days, I think this was kind of when this started, I do a book when I sort of start to see a series of work coming to an end. It seems like a good way to sum up a series of work. So I sort of started shopping around for writers and poets who lived in the Connecticut River Valley. And eventually found eight different writers, two from each state that the river flows through. And either asked them to write something about the Connecticut River, or if they already had something written, I would try to entertain that. And eventually Place of the Long River was the result. I made 14 color woodcuts, or color reduction woodcuts, in the book. There's foldouts. There's, each of the writer's kind of location is paired with 01:04:00 imagery from that area. There's maps on the inside covers, on the inside front cover there's various locations of where the images come from that are in the book. And on the back cover, the locations of where the writers live are indicated on the map of New England and the Connecticut River Valley. The book was printed in the edition of 100 copies. The biggest production I've ever done before. And it was bound by Barbara Blumenthal in Northampton, Massachusetts, in kind of a Japanese silk blue cloth with these little strands of orange that kind of look like sunset on the water. SL: Could you talk a little bit about how the process that you went through to make these color reduction woodcuts? JL: Just the technical aspect of how you do that? SL: Yeah, a little bit. JL: Well, I generally make a drawing on the block. A lot of 01:05:00 times it already exists on paper and I transfer it onto the block. But I put all of the information I'm every going to need on the block. A very fully drawn image. And I use birch plywood mounted on MDF, or to get it up to be type-high. Birch plywood is only about a quarter of an inch thick, and it doesn't need to be any thicker than that. And then after I draw the image with all the line work and all the tones on it, I seal that with shellac. And any part of the drawing, part of the image that's going to be white, it's cut away. But most of the black is still line cut. And then I ink the block up and print it on all of the sheets I ever intend to print with the lightest color. Let's say it's yellow. SL: Okay. JL: Just for the sake of argument. Where I want that yellow to appear in the image, the final image, I then cut those areas away from the block. So that when I roll the block up and print it over the top 01:06:00 of the first run, the yellow shows through the holes. Then I print the next darkest color, usually. Let's say it's a pink or something. The yellow's going to show through the holes of the next run. Or I want the pink to show up, I cut those areas away, and roll it up with the next darkest color, and print that on all of my sheets. So with reduction, you are constantly printing and cutting, printing and cutting. There's no way to proof it all up ahead of time to see what it's going to look like. You have to go on faith that it's going to work. And you print on all the sheets that you ever intend to use, because there's no way to go back and print more, because you're cutting it away. When you're all done, you print the last run, usually in the darkest color. Most of the block is in the trash can at that point, and you're printing just thin little skinny lines and some dark shadows and small areas. Most of the block is carved away. So there's a destructive quality to the creation of the image, which I kind of enjoy. I like the irony and the poetry of that idea. It's a little bit like walking on a tightrope. You hope you get to the other side, you don't fall off. I like that risk. Before I started doing reduction woodcut, when I did etchings or when I would do other kinds of relief prints, I would do all the proofing and I would 01:07:00 sort of get all my jollies out as I was working through getting that image to a resolved point. Then it just becomes work to crank them off, print a bunch of copies. That's not very much fun. With reduction, you don't know what you're going to get until you're all done printing. When you put that last run on and you see the magic of that thing all come together, it's amazing. And, you're all done printing. You don't have to go back and crank off a bunch of copies after the fact. So my editions before I started doing reduction printing were kind of small. Because I just would get bored with printing them. It was work. Once I started doing reduction, my editions got bigger because I wanted to make sure everybody had enough copies for all the work that I was going through. And you know, I would be printing the edition as I was conceiving and developing the image. My sheets go through, both books and single-sheet prints, go through the press routinely 12 to 15 times and even more, 20, 20 times, to produce the kind of lush layers of colors and color relationships that I'm looking for. And as time has gone on, they've become more and more kind of watercolor-like, with layers, 01:08:00 very translucent layers of ink. With lots of transparent base in them, so that I'm getting very subtle gradations, and subtle color relationships that come from the way that I print the blocks. I do a lot of color blends and I use a lot of stencils to localize colors in different areas. And spend a lot of time printing these things. But like I said, in the end, the edition is done when the image is finished. So it's just a wonderful way that kind of works out. SL: And how do you choose the colors? Were you, for Place of the Long River, looking back at your work in pastels? Or was this just very different in terms of the colors that you were choosing? JL: I was looking at my pastels. The thing is, the coloration of pastel is so totally different. It's kind of dry and chalky compared to what I'm doing in relief print. So there's always a translation, which is kind of good. It's something new. I don't like the idea of sort of reproducing things, something that already exists somehow, just making a bunch more 01:09:00 copies of it. I like everything to be something new. So it's always a translation from the pastel drawings to the color woodcuts. And I'm still having to kind of figure it out. It's not just this color on the drawing goes here on the print. It's really something new, and the color relationships are kind of intuitive. I lay down some colors. Oftentimes I'll lay down some color blends in the sky and in the water, maybe. And then start building on top of some of those color blend relationships with other kind of colors. Working always from light to dark. And it's almost always, you can always make it darker. It's very hard to make it lighter if it gets too dark. So I always try to work in that direction. And eventually, like I said, they become more or less like watercolor paintings. But I've never done watercolor, so it was a kind of weird, weird thing. Recently I've started doing watercolor. Because I just sort of felt like making these prints, they looked a certain way, why can't I do it directly on the paper. So I started doing that. SL: And how do you like that? JL: I like it. I'm not a very classically trained kind of watercolorist. I'm not a purist by any 01:10:00 means. I just do whatever I've got to do. I use a lot of gouache, and I draw back onto the sheets. But it's as close to painting as I've ever gotten. So I enjoy it. I enjoy the kind of quick aspect to it, because so much of my work takes so long to produce. And this is a way of kind of getting something that the results are a lot quicker. I draw all the time, so everything I do has a basis in drawing, whether it's pencil drawings or charcoal or pastel. I usually consider these watercolors more or less as drawings, because of the way that I kind of work. SL: Mm hmm. And did you take any color theory courses? Or did you just kind of develop your sense of the relationships through other courses? JL: Well, I had a sort of typical color class that most art students have. And I did color wheels and color stripes. You know, learned the theory of it. But a lot of times, that stuff just doesn't help you much when you're in the studio. Complementary colors I think and value are probably the two major things about color that I respond to. Complementary colors hype each other up. When they sit next to each other, 01:11:00 they calm each other down. When they're mixed together, they grey each other out. So I use that idea of complementary colors a lot in the way that I use color. And then I think in terms of value. Because I'm constantly adding transparent base to my inks, I start with very thin layers. So a lot of the white of the paper shows through. The light goes through the ink and bounces back to your eye, like it does in watercolor. So when people print, a lot of times people print really, really thick and opaque. And I tend to go the other direction. I tend to make things very thin and transparent, trying to get them to drop down to the paper and slowly build it up. So that's probably why my prints take so long to make, because I make such subtle 01:12:00 jumps, subtle changes. But it's the way that I sort of work in order to get the kind of results that I'm after. I oftentimes will do the pencil drawing in just black and white, to kind of work out basic value structures. And I'm very cognizant of composition, of how composition works in the space. How the space is framed up, and where the shapes are and how they work sort of abstractly. And I work that all out first as pencil drawings. Before I think too much about the color, I think about how the value relationships work. And eventually that kind of morphs into color as I start to get into making the print. SL: Thank you for sharing that. JL: Sure. SL: Would you like to talk about some of your other books? JL: Yeah. SL: I know, let's see, Lonesome Rows, I know we have at UW Madison. Did you want to talk a little bit about that one? JL: Maybe even before I talk about that one, I'll mention another, I'm not sure if 01:13:00 you have this book. No, you don't. This book called Trouble Light. This is a large, accordion fold book I produced in 1989. And it's a linoleum cut book. It is 15 and a quarter inches tall, and it opens out to 88 inches long. So it's a pretty long, big book. It came from a series of work that I was doing about light. Both light in terms of visual light and how it works in a space and illuminates things, but also poetically or more sort of philosophically and mystically with light, is about. And so it's a lot of symbolic imagery and the different kinds of forms of light. And it moves from left to right along the accordion fold. Sort of panorama with various images sort of spliced together to create this kind of journey that takes place. And it goes through various locations that have different kinds of light in them. There's two snatches of nursery rhymes carved into the blocks that appear in the book. And at the end, it ends with a large beehive. And both the idea of light and the idea of beehives were symbolic imagery that I'd been working with quite a bit in that period in the late '80s, in drawings and in other prints. And it kind of coalesced into this book called Trouble Light. The term "trouble light" comes from my father. He was an aeronautical 01:14:00 engineer, but he was also an amazing auto mechanic and just incredibly handy guy. And a lot of times he would have me come out into the garage at night while he was working on a car. And he would say, "Here, hold this trouble light. Hold it over the hood so I can see what I'm doing." And you know trouble light is like a utility light with a little cage on it so you don't burn yourself with the bulb. And there's a little hook on it, you can hook it up under the hood so you can see what you're doing. And there's just, other people just, I don't know if they use that term or not, but he always called it a trouble light. And years later, I used to think about that phrase and thought it was kind of a strange poetic term, trouble light. What happens when we turn on a trouble light? Does trouble vanish, the way that 01:15:00 the dark vanishes? Or does it attract trouble, the way a yard light attracts bugs in the summer at night? I just liked the poetry of that term. So that's how that book came about. And like I say, it came out of a series of work that had to do with light. Then Alchemical Lion, you have that, I think. Yeah. That's a book by Jesse Glass. It's a poem about a kind of a mystical lion. And I was, got a fellowship from the Brandywine Workshop in Philadelphia. They bring artists in to produce prints in their workshop using hand-drawn Mylars printed on their rotary offset presses. So they're hand-drawn, but then those Mylars are shot onto photo litho plates. And it's usually a fairly rote way they do it. You draw up a yellow Mylar, and you do like a red Mylar, blue Mylar and a black Mylar. You're there for a week and they 01:16:00 print one color a day. I decided to do a book, which kind of threw them for a loop, because they'd never produced a book before. And so what I did was I, they would work routinely on a sheet of 22 by 30 arches paper. And what I did was I drew the image up so that it was still printed on that size sheet, but it was two strips that would be cut horizontally down the middle, and then joined together to create the long, accordion fold. And so I drew the Mylars up at home. They'd send you all the materials, they'd tell you exactly how to do it. So you'd come to Philadelphia to a workshop with the stuff ready to print, so you can get going right away. So I threw them all up and I handed them to and I went there and they printed the first color, it was going to be a yellow. And I'm looking at the Pantone book. And the director is saying, "Here, you can probably use this color, this is the best, use this yellow." And I'm thinking oh, man, that's so bright! That seems like Day-Glo yellow. "No, no, 01:17:00 this is the color. You should use this." So I said well, all right. (laughs) So they ran a hundred sheets with this yellow. And as soon as I saw it oh, God, oh, no. (laughs) I can't stomach this yellow. So I spent the rest of the week trying to keep ahead of the printer in redrawing each of the Mylars to cancel out the yellow, to knock it back. SL: Oh, wow. JL: So I'd be there all night long trying to get these Mylars drawn up so that first thing in the morning when the printer would come, he could shoot them onto plates to run the next color. So in the end, it worked out. It doesn't look like anything I've ever done before. But it did require a lot of extra time to get these things to work. We split the edition in half. They kept their 50 copies and I brought mine home. And I worked a little bit more on mine with some silk screen to try to kind of push it around to get it the way I wanted it. And then I did a binding, just hard covers on either end with a two-color image on the cover. Later on, the Brandywine 01:18:00 workshop wanted to bind their copies, so I ran them some covers and sent them. I didn't want to do the binding. So I sent them the covers and I think some students from University of the Arts did the binding under Mary Phelan's auspices there. She teaches, or had taught at University of the Arts. A Wisconsin student, alum, I overlapped with there at Madison. And so that book, like I say, it doesn't look like anything I've ever done before, but it worked out in an interesting way. In 1992, I ran The Immigrants, which is a poem by Joe Napora. It's a single poem about his father's immigrant family. I think they're from Hungary. And the whole poem is based on an old photograph of his father's family after they had immigrated to this country. And he addresses the different people in the photo and what kind of happened to them. And so I used the photo as the basis for my imagery. And I had a letterpress half-tone block made of the photo to put on the title page. And then I just worked with that 01:19:00 photo in different ways. Editing, cropping it, working with different aspects of the different figures through the book. It's kind of a small pamphlet, sewn paper cover book. But it has woodcut and relief etching, and a fold out, color reduction woodcut. And then a kind of a built up additive block at the back. And kind of has a little photo engraving, letterpress engraving on the cover, of a stitching tapestry kind of thing from the Hungarian kind of culture. That appears on the title page, too. SL: And Jim, how did you end up working on this project? I know last time you mentioned you hadn't really done work with poets on your first couple of books. JL: Yeah. Well both the Alchemical Lion and Immigrants were, I was going out looking for people to work with, trying to come up with some editions that were publishing people's work. Because I had not done things with other, collaborations with writers or other people. So those were definite stabs at publishing other people's work. I also in '88 and '89 did a series of broadsides. I got a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts and I produced five broadsides, publishing different poets' work. Jesse Glass and Joe Napora both had poems 01:20:00 of theirs on a broadside. And I did a broadside with Ted Enslin and another with local Connecticut poet Brendan Galvin. And another one with another Connecticut poet named Franz Douskey. So that was actually some of my first forays into working with writers. And then these two books kind of evolved out of that. But Place of the Long River in '93, you know, that's where I really had, I had eight different writers I was working with on that particular book. SL: And you mentioned that that process took a long time. How long did it take to make the 100 copies of that book? JL: Of which book? SL: Of Place of the Long River. JL: Oh, it was about two years. Yeah, I would say it was about two, most of two years. It might have taken a little bit longer for the actual binding to get done before it was actually issued. But my work on it was about two years. And then after The Place of the Long River and the kind of landscape work that led up to that, I pretty much was at that point fully immersed in the landscape. That was sort of where, the direction I just took. So all of my single-sheet print 01:21:00 work and drawings have been focused basically on landscapes since then. And then Lonesome Rows, which you have there at UW, it came out of that work in 1999. Glastonbury and South Glastonbury had a lot of orchards and agricultural spaces. And I would just go down and draw on the orchards. And I loved the way that apple orchards and peach orchards are sort of set up with kind of long rows of trees kind of traveling over the landscape. And especially in apple orchards, they prune the trees so severely and specifically to sort of maximize the yield, that they're these strange, sort of skeletal like forms once they do that. And so I would sit and draw these things 01:22:00 and create these landscape spaces that are natural spaces, but they're sort of manmade spaces because of the way these rows travel over the landscape. Out of a series of drawings that I'd done then I produced this book called Lonesome Rows. And again, it was sort of, when I started to see this series of work kind of coming to an end. So I thought well, okay, it's time to make a book that will sort of sum up what I've been thinking about. So Lonesome Rows is another accordion-fold book that has various images of orchard spaces sort of spliced together. It's panoramic in the sense that it opens out and is a continuous flow of imagery. But each panel is somewhat different than the one next door. It's not a continuous image. But they join each other, abut each other, and compositionally connect, but they're different spaces. Some are plowed fields and some are orchard rows. And it opens up to about five feet long. And on the back side of the accordion, it's sort of an abstract echo of what's on the front side. It's a little more intuitive and a little more abstract 01:23:00 expressionist in the way that I approach the back side. It has some of the same kind of mark making, and some of the same coloration, but is sort of non-representational, just sort of an abstraction of some of what I was thinking about on the front side. The book was printed from two long birch blocks on our flatbed offset press at the Hartford School, which has a large format, so I could print like 38 inches across. And it's color reduction woodcuts, so I printed many, many, many times. In that with an edition of 30 it has no text in it, it has a colophon print on the back cover. You know, image of the cover, but there's no text inside. SL: Did you want to add anything about that book? JL: Well, I think that's pretty much it about 01:24:00 Lonesome Rows. In 2003, I did another sabbatical and I went to Nova Scotia and northern Maine, New Brunswick, and hung out for a while. And spent a bunch of time along the coast of Cape Breton, the northern part of Nova Scotia. And I really like the idea of the various people who have lived in Nova Scotia. First the Micmac Indians, the native people that lived there before us Europeans came. But then the Scots and the English and the Irish and the French Acadian. So it's a whole mixture of different kinds of people who have lived there over the years. But out of going there and kind of trying to assimilate some of the culture and of course the landscape and the sense of place, I became most interested in the Micmac native people that first inhabited Nova Scotia and New Brunswick area in Canada So when I came home, I did a series of prints just about Nova Scotia and about, sort of based on the drawings that I was doing there. 01:25:00 Eventually I decided I wanted to do a book about that area. And there were so many different ways that could have gone. And in the end, I decided to focus on the Micmac native peoples. So I sort of shopped around, tried a lot of different approaches to it. In the end, I hit on working with an ethnologist, the head ethnologist at the Nova Scotia Museum of History in Halifax, Ruth Holmes Whitehead. And she's like the material culture go-to person for Micmac culture. She's written many wonderful books about the Micmac people. And she let me excerpt stuff from three of her books. One of the creation story about Glooskap, the Algonquin cultural hero, and how he sort of got the world going. And another story in there is about the turtle, and how the turtle got his wrinkled skin. The Micmac world had a lot of shapeshifting. And people are human beings, and 01:26:00 then they're animals, and then they're rocks, and then they're stars. They constantly change and morph into different forms. And the largest section of this book is a story of Micmac women that marry star husbands. They're sort of abducted by, there's two sisters. They're abducted by these stars. They're taken up to the world above the sky. And initially they're happy about the idea. But eventually they want to come back to the earth world. And the story is about the various things they have to do in order to come back to the earth world. There's a lot of animals in it. And the texts are embedded into the imagery. It's a horizontal format book called A'tugwaqan, which is Micmac for story or tale. And the texts are overlapping the imagery. And you see some of the imagery through the text. So I was constantly having to balance the opacity of the imagery together with the text. It was pretty text-heavy. But there's, each page has full bleed color reduction woodcuts in it. There's a tremendous amount of printing in this book. (laughs) The inside covers have Micmac porcupine quill designs printed on the front and back cover end sheets. I got permission to reproduce Micmac petroglyphs from the Nova Scotia area. I'd redraw them and cut them as wood blocks. So they appeared together with my original pictorial color woodcuts. There's I think 01:27:00 23 page surfaces, printed page surfaces in the book. It's a horizontal format. It opens to, I can't remember now. It's about 9 by 13, I think, horizontally. Closed. And once I finally finished the printing, it took four years to print the book in an edition of 100 copies. So when I was finally done printing, I did not want to do the binding. (laughter) I was ready to turn it over to somebody. So I had Sarah Creighton, a bookbinder from East Hampton, Massachusetts, do the binding. She did a beautiful three-part binding with a kind of a red spine. And then my printed color images on the front and back covers. On the front, it's a porcupine quill, double curve design, which is a classic Micmac Indian design. On the backside 01:28:00 it's kind of abstract but it's basically a map of Nova Scotia on the backside. And it's all printed in such a way that it looks like birch bark on the front and back covers. SL: And did I understand you correctly that you said you were working on the text at the same time as the illustrations? JL: Well, I gathered the text from Ruth Whitehead. And I did a little bit of editing that she let me kind of tinker a little bit with some of the lengths of things. But it's basically her writing. SL: But I mean, when you were printing? JL: Oh, yeah, yeah. I set the type, yeah, and printed. I would have to do the entire image first and then drop the letterpress over the top. So again, there's a certain amount of risk there. (laughs) 01:29:00 It's been weeks and weeks and weeks of making an image. And at the very end I would have to drop the letterpress over the top and hope everything would fit. And you know, it just comes with the territory. But the text is, I would hope that the text would sit up on top of the image and be able to be legible. And you never quite know until you do it how it's going to work out. So I had to make sure that I sort of go on faith that I was leaving a space that was calm enough, simple enough, that the text would sit up on top and work well. And I think it did. SL: And did you do those kind of one at a time, or a few at a time, to kind of see how that was working so that, I'm just curious if you like did a few of the illustrations and then worked with the 01:30:00 text on a few and kind of played with it that way? JL: Yeah, I would generally do a whole page spread. And then, so I'd get the image in a codex. Now some of the images on one sheet of paper, with gathered folios. Some on the right hand side on another piece of paper. And so I would get the left hand, the left hand side working up, and then I'd work the right hand side, and kind of work back and forth between those two until the image looked good as it goes across the two pages. And then I would drop the text on them and I would do the text on that spread. Then I would go onto the next spread and start from scratch again. Work the image up and then eventually put the text on it. So, yeah, the text would go on when the image was done, but not before the next image would be done. SL: Okay. JL: And it was a long process. (laughs) Four 01:31:00 years on one particular thing. I mean, every now and then I'd stop and do a little something else. But generally my single-sheet print production and production of everything else just kind of came to a halt while I was working on this book. And then since then I've not done anything nearly as complicated and time-consuming. SL: Do you sometimes work with assistants? JL: Never have. SL: Never have. JL: Well, occasionally I might have a student down at the school, if I happen to be working at the school for some reason, I've had some students kind of help me out a little bit down there. But nothing other than that. And I guess it's because I tend to be kind of, I don't know, mercurial about how I work. And I'm not sure that I would feel comfortable having other people around while I'm trying to make decisions. And sometimes I do something, I don't like it, so I can go back and redo it in a different way. I think I'd have a hard time doing that with an assistant sort of standing around, waiting, 01:32:00 "Oh, what do I do now?" (laughs) SL: Sure. JL: So you know, a lot of times I wish I could do that. I wish I had either the financial means to hire me to help me do stuff, or that I could get a grant or something to help create, do some assistant funding. But it's never really worked out. And at this point in my life, I probably am not sure how well I'd be able to do it. SL: Mm hmm. Well you mentioned that you haven't done stuff as complicated recently. Can you talk a little bit about your more recent work? JL: Well, my most recent book has been 2014. And 2013, I took another sabbatical, which seems to be the way I work every 10 years I do a sabbatical. Instead of every seven years, it seems like it's every 10 years. And in 2013 I went to Ireland for six weeks. I was on a residency in County Mayo in the northwest of Ireland at the Ballinglen Art Foundation. And they give you a cottage to live in and a studio 01:33:00 to work in and then just turn you loose to do whatever you want. So I roamed around the countryside in the west of Ireland and took photographs and did drawings. I didn't do any printing while I was there, because I didn't feel I had enough time. I just wanted to gather the visual information. And I love Ireland. And I've always loved the idea of Ireland. And it's been a goal of mine to get there for a substantial amount of time for a long time. And so when I was there, I came home with a lot of drawings. And that led to a series of prints that I'm still working on, prints and drawings. And that's where I started doing watercolor, actually. I figured I'm out of my element, I'm in a different country, totally different place, maybe I'll try something different. And pastel, I was also worried about 01:34:00 making a lot of pastel drawings and then having them get all smudged and smeared up before I'd get them home, because they're kind of fragile. So I thought well maybe watercolor would be a solution to that. So I started doing watercolor and sort of found my way with it. And so when I came home, I continued to do it for a while. And then in 2014, I had to do a, well, actually before that, I was commissioned to do a print in a portfolio by Diane Fine, another Wisconsin alum, who teaches at SUNY Plattsburg. And she was doing a portfolio with a variety of print artists called How Do You Get There from Here? And the idea was that it was a triptych. You had to come up with a three-panel sort of an image. And it came up just before I was ready to go to Ireland. So it seemed like a perfect subject. So first panel I did before I went, which was 01:35:00 sort of about getting read technology go to Ireland. Some sort of symbolic kind of stuff was in that first panel. The middle panel is sort of, it's kind of really the aurora borealis kind of shows up in there with some other things. And then the third panel is a Neolithic passage tomb, stone passage tomb from North Mayo with a teacup floating over it. So that print was done for this portfolio. But I had a lot of copies left over. And invariably I have copies that don't make it into the edition. They're not good enough. Some slight mis-registrations or I changed my mind about the colors or whatever. So I had all these proofs left over. And I have lots of proofs of other projects around that I just can't bear to part with. And I have a lot of blocks from other projects that I just can't bear to part with. The leftover, the 01:36:00 last run of the reduction print, but there's still a lot of good stuff left on it. I've just got racks and racks of that stuff. So I thought, you know what, I'm going to put all this stuff together, make a little Mulligan stew of a bunch of stuff from various projects. And so this book came out of it called Ragged Remains. And there's only seven copies. It's a codex, hard cover codex, with paper over boards. And there's a section from the A'tugwaqan book of a whole spread that just didn't work out. I had to totally abandon one of the spreads and redo it. I had all these sheets that was totally, that just never got used. So I cropped parts of that and that became part of the cover paper for this Ragged Remains 01:37:00 book. And then as you open the book, there's this accordion strip that pulls out. And on one side is sections of the image from this How Do You Get There from Here portfolio image, but also some other stuff I'd printed over the top of it from old blocks that I have kicking around. Then on the back side of the accordion is a stone wall from the Burren region of western Ireland, which is just an amazing region of huge slabs of limestone all over the landscape, everywhere you look. It's almost like it's been paved with these huge slabs of limestone. And the farmers dig that stuff up and they make these incredibly beautiful abstract erratic stone walls that border their land. And I would see these-I mean, it's that way all over Ireland, but the ones in the Burren are just especially amazing. And so I did this color reduction woodcut of an extremely abstract stone wall on the back side of that accordion. So it's a kind of a book about left over things and reusing them and recycling them and putting them together in new ways, just like farmers reuse the slabs of rock to make stone walls, I reuse old blocks and old sheets to make this book. SL: Mm hmm. Would you care to add anything about how-I mean, I think you've talked a lot about how you've done each of your books. How would you kind of looking back say that your books have evolved? JL: Well I think, like I said, I think initially 01:38:00 they were sort of, my first books were sort of canned. I found a set of ideas like nursery rhymes, that already exist. Or the seven deadly sins, that already exist. A set of things that I would just sort of riff on and play with. And then I sort of started to find my own sort of voice about things, which is almost always somewhat of some kind of a personal mythology of invention of things that relate to who, everything I do is sort of autobiographical. Whether it's obvious or not, it's sort of about me. With artists, I think their work really is about then on one level or another. And so a lot of the work that I was doing early in the '80s and '90s was about me in various ways, kind of superimposing these kind of mythological inventions and fictions onto me and onto my story. And then like I was saying, I made a concerted effort to try to do some publishing of other people's work, and collaborating and working with other people and trying to sort of bounce off of their ideas. And I think that sometimes that works better than other times. It's a process. Those things always take longer, because 01:39:00 you've got to make sure that the collaborations work and make sense, and you've got to give the other person space to make that work. When I do things on my own, I can make my own decisions, make them really quick. Do things that I'm just personally interested in. I don't have to ask anybody else's opinion or make sure it's going to work for anybody else. And like I said, I think as time has gone on, the space between the books has increased because I'm doing a lot of single-sheet prints and drawings in long series. Series of maybe four or five or more years. And then in the end, when I start to see that sort of coming to an end, that seems like it's time to make a book. So I'm an occasional book artist. It's not something that I do all the time. It's not my primary studio practice. It's one feature of my studio practice. And like I say, I think it's a way of kind of 01:40:00 summing things up and putting the period at the end of the sentence. SL: Do you think you'll continue to make artist books, then? JL: I will. But I think that the edition sizes will probably be smaller, just so I can get them done quicker. And they may be less complicated. But if something comes along where I run across a story or particular writer or poet or a particular idea that needs some bigger production, I'm not going to shy away from it. But I'd just kind of like to get more work out there and not have it take quite as long to produce, because it takes long enough as it is for me to do anything. SL: Is there anything else that you'd like to add before we talk a bit about your teaching? JL: Um, no, I think that's probably it. SL: Okay. Good. So you've been teaching for how long at the University of Hartford now? JL: I have been there for 35 years. SL: Okay. Congratulations. JL: Yeah. Thank you. Since 1982. SL: And 01:41:00 how would you say you have approached teaching over the years? I know before we started recording you mentioned that initially you were just kind of getting your bearings. But now that you've been teaching for a while, how would you say you approach teaching? JL: Well, I have three I would say major things I like to try to get across to people, no matter what I'm teaching. Drawing is probably fundamental to everything that I do. Mark making, tonality, building up the surface, working the surface, if it's a drawing, if it's a print, if it's in a book format. Drawing almost always is a kind of fundamental thing that I want to try to get people involved in. Some people are not interested in drawing, so then we have to kind of negotiate how this is going to work. (laughs) They may be photographers or more typographically oriented or something. Maybe drawing doesn't come as naturally to them as 01:42:00 the other students. But I sort of see everything as a drawing in one way or another. In value, tonality, how the value relationships work is something that I'm also very concerned about, and getting across to students. I teach foundations drawing every semester to freshmen. So value's a major, major component of what I talk to them about. And then composition. How the space is designed, whether it's a drawing or a print or if it's a more complicated multi-plane surface, like a book format. How you compose and activate that space is the other major thing that I care about. I don't care what the subject is, what the technique is, or the style. Those are other issues. But everybody makes a composition when they go to start, they put the pencil down on a piece of paper or something and they have to activate that space and think about how that space works, wall to wall, from one side to the other. And whether you use 01:43:00 it all or not, you still have to think about it. So I try to infuse those ideas in everything that I'm doing. In my relief print class, I want to get people involved in how the light and darks work in a relief print. But I tell them, "You've got black already. If you roll the block up in black, everything's already there black. To make white, you just hack away at the wood, or the linoleum. It's the middle values in between the black and the white, those polar opposites, and how you can bring them together with intermediate values, that I think really have a lot to do with how successful a relief print is. So I like to infuse them with the idea of creating different kinds of mark making systems. Hatchings and stippling and linear activity that creates optical grays, or middle values, if it's a color print that can work between the extremely dark uncut areas and the bright, carved away whites that make that subtle 01:44:00 inter-relationships between those opposites work. And intaglio, in an etching, I'm also interested in them really working the plate. And probably intaglio is the most difficult course that I teach, because it's slow. And increasingly students have shorter and shorter attention spans. So when it doesn't happen right away, at the click of a mouse or the swipe of their fingers across a screen, cell phone screen, they get impatient. And the whole idea of etching, anyway, is about time. Time is part of the, it's a tool in your toolkit. How long you bite the plate for, how long it sits in the acid. That's a major component of the process. And it doesn't happen all at one time, either. Usually you bite the plate and you proof it, see what it looks like. Go back, you work it some more. You proof it again. Slowly it builds up. And I try to get them to have patience and really wait for that. Keep working it until 01:45:00 it really is resolved. And it's increasingly difficult to get them to want to spend the amount of time that's necessary. But that's my goal is to try to get them to really work the plates and have them be as rich as possible. That only happens over a period of time. And in book arts, you know, I want to try to get them to think about the book format as a space in which they are moving around. They're inhabiting this book space. They're using, almost like it's a theater or a film in which things happen and come and go and become almost like a film director in the way that they approach the book space. When to have things become really complicated and busy and full, and when to sort of back off and let them become more spare. The spacing of what takes place in a book is very complicated. And it's very slow to develop. My book arts, when I first started teaching book arts, I taught letterpress, I taught one of a kind books, and I taught an editioned book, all in one semester. And a broadside, all in one semester. It was way too much. So we broke it out into two courses, so that there's Book 1, which somebody else teaches, that is unique books and book structures and 01:46:00 binding, and just the physical building of books, and one of a kind books. And then I teach Book Arts 2, which is letterpress printing and editions of books. And so they already know how to make a book and how that book space works. And I have them do a broadside first so I can teach them letterpress printing and putting text and image together, and just understand the mechanics of letterpress. And then I have them do a very specific dummy of a book. I try to let them make decisions about concepts and subject matter and what's in the book. But I try to get them to be as concrete in their dummy as possible, in their mock-up, so that mock-up becomes a guideline for how the book is then produced in the edition. Sometimes they have to deviate from that mock-up. Things happen along the way. (laughs) Decisions get made. Sometimes they start to run out of time, so they simplify things. in fact, a lot of times in teaching book arts, a lot of what I do is to try to kind of corral them in a little bit. "You know, I don't think you're going to have time to get this done. Can you simplify this? Is there a way to say 01:47:00 this just as well, but say it in slightly simpler terms, or more succinctly?" They have grandiose ideas, and sometimes they just don't have time in a semester to get it done. Over the years, I've put together a letterpress shop for our school. We have two Vandercooks and a range of letterpress type. I like to get people to do work with things like putting different kinds of materials on MDF board, and print that first, lay down different textures and drop type and images on top of that so I have a bank of different kinds of materials around. Old like vinyl wall covering material and different surfaces encourage people to work with different textures. I show them about pressure printing, which is creating make-ready building plates that are taped to the underside of the paper on the cylinder of a proofing press, so that it strikes harder where 01:48:00 the surface is slightly raised. So they get these kind of soft, smoky kinds of patterns and textures from pressure printing. I try to work my book arts classes with whatever students already knew how to do. A lot of times if they're print majors they've already done other print processes, and they can bring that into the book arts realm. Or do lithos or do etching, they can do that. But a lot of times they have not yet done very much printmaking, and so I sort of push them towards relief printing, because it's the most natural way to get at stuff together with letterpress, because they're the same kind of press and a lot of the same techniques. And so over the course of the semester, in Book Arts 2 they get one edition of usually ten copies done. And it's a real rush from getting to the end, to get it all done. (laughs) And I think they always underestimate how much time it's going to take. And then about three weeks from the end, they sort of, it dawns on them how much more they've got to do, and they really have to hunker down and push themselves to get it finished. SL: And how many students do you have in a class, typically? JL: Normally somewhere between eight and ten. The university has gotten kind of sticky about sizes of classes. They won't run things, technically it's always supposed to be ten, but they've let us run it with less. But the past couple of years, they've clamped down on that. So sometimes I don't have enough people to run a class, or I have to combine a couple of classes together in order to have enough kids to satisfy the university. And we've done some curricular changes recently in 01:49:00 the printing department to combine some standalone courses into bigger classes that have different kinds of media together, just to get enough warm bodies in the room to be able to run the class. It's become more and more of a challenge, I think, over the years, to populate the upper levels of the printmaking classes. We have always got four intro level classes, which we run, usually four intro level printmaking classes a semester: etching, relief, monotype and Book 1. And litho one. Sometimes those things alternate. But getting them to go beyond the first level is always the issue. Because they oftentimes want to go off and do illustration or graphic design. So they're required to take a printmaking course as part of the curriculum for their sophomore level. SL: Sure. JL: We always have really full, exciting intro level courses with a big mixture of students who have come from different backgrounds with different interests. And 01:50:00 the idea of trying to get them excited about printmaking is a challenge, but is what those courses are about. And we always get some that move on up into the junior level and become majors. But, like I said, it's getting harder and harder these days to get enough people in the room to run some of these classes. So sometimes that whole business is a challenge. SL: And Jim, how many classes do you teach a semester? JL: I teach three studio classes each semester. SL: Okay. JL: I always teach a foundations drawing class. In the fall I usually teach, we have two senior capstone courses. So in the fall, I teach Senior Printmaking Studio 1, and my colleague teaches it in the spring. And then I teach one of the intro level courses, usually, as my third course in the fall. And then in spring I teach, again, the drawing class. And usually a 01:51:00 different intro level, usually two print courses, two into print courses in spring. But then when I know that I've got enough people to run a Book Arts 2 class, I'll do that usually in the spring. SL: So I wanted to ask you earlier, how do you balance teaching with working on your own projects? JL: Well, it's the standard problem with teaching. Summers, I generally don't teach much during the summers. I used to teach a six-week class during the summer, and I just stopped doing it. I teach a workshop in Vermont most years at Art New England workshops in Bennington College. That's just a weeklong workshop. So I have most of my summers off. And that's when I really hunker down and try to do as much work as I can. I try to stay in the studio. And then during January, I have winter term between the two, fall and spring and semester. And sometimes I teach a letterpress class during that two-week class, that month. But I don't always do it. When I do, then it throws a little crimp into what I can get done during 01:52:00 the winter break. But usually I have both of the months during January, late December and January, that I try and get some work done. But it is a balancing act. And I find as I get older and older that I'm able to do less at night. I used to come home when I was 24, 25, I'd come home after teaching all day long and spend six or eight hours in the studio. I just can't do that anymore. SL: Yeah, that's a long day. JL: I'm on basically a two-day schedule where I teach from 8:30 in the morning till about 8:30 at night Mondays and Wednesdays. Then I have Tuesday, Thursday, Friday off. But I almost always have to go in on one of those days for meetings and various other things. So it winds up being about two days off during the week. And I try to use those days as well. But during the academic year, there's committees and 01:53:00 there's things that I have to write, and there's just a lot of other stuff that goes on. I try to have something going all the time. But during the academic year, it sits around a lot. A week or two might go by. I go down to my studio-I have my studio in my basement here at my house. I'll go down, I'll look at what I was working on two weeks ago and go, what was I doing? What was I going to do next? Where am I? What am I supposed to do now? And I've got to sort of gear up again. So that's really hard. A big vacation is where I can really get a head of steam up and really get something rolling. That's when I do the majority of my work. SL: Well, I think we're heading to the end. I just wondered if there were any final thoughts that you had, maybe about how the UW impacted your career as an artist? JL: Well, it certainly 01:54:00 did. It sort of sent me on a trajectory to be a print artist. Like before I went to undergraduate school, I had no idea what that was. I sort of learned about printmaking in undergraduate school. But the two years before I went to Madison and then the two years at Madison really were seminal in forming who I am I think as a print artist, the kind of ethic that I have about how the technique and the image should mesh, and one should not kind of overpower the other. That the craft is an important major element, that you can't have concept without beautiful craft, beautiful technique that expands on the idea and gives the concept of a home, a place to exist. And that comes right out of the people I work with at UW. From Warrington Colescott and Ray Gloeckler and Walter Hamady, especially. Those three guys had a really huge impact on how I see myself as an artist, as a person who's a print artist, and how one can fill that role in the world, and how to sort of operate. How to negotiate the world. A lot of things have changed since those days. And the ways of operating, the ways of being an artist have certainly changed in the 35, 38 years since I went to school. But it was an amazing time that I still look back on fondly and think how lucky I was to be there at that time. I still regularly talk to a lot of the other people that I went to school with there. We see each other at conferences and we communicate. We 01:55:00 share ideas amongst ourselves. We're a real cadre. For a while, there was a name going around. We were the Madison Mafia. SL: Yes. JL: Or the Madison cohort of people. And we've all gone on to become, I think, fairly important print artists. And I feel lucky and honored to be a part of that group. So I'm not sure where I would be if I had not gone to UW when I did. SL: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jim. This has been very nice. JL: Well, thank you, Sarah. I've really enjoyed thinking about those days and looking back on my career. Good luck with this project. I look forward to hearing all these various interviews, and hearing what