Ericka Walker
Bounty, 30x40in., lithograph and screenprint, 2017
“Different types of appeals involve different colour schemes.”
Ericka Walker is an artist living and working in Nova Scotia, Canada. Her approach to color is tactical, with a healthy dose of indecisive intuition. Her approach to printmaking is often procedural, with sporadic bouts of experimentation and innovation. Her large poster work is created with lithographic printmaking techniques.
Currently she is working on three projects: a series of woodcuts commemorating man-made explosions; a series of National Historic Site plaque rubbings-come-refrigerator-magnet-poetry; and a new series of figurative lithographic posters.
Where do you reside between technical and intuitive in your work as an artist using color?
I have an oftentimes fraught relationship with “getting it right” when it comes to colour. For example, my friends and colleagues - many of whom are equipped with more rigorous technical backgrounds - take a considerably dim view of my reluctance to run colour trial proofs. More bewildering to them is my refusal to pre-mix colours in order to see the grouping as a team prior to printing. The best explanation I offer is that I find value in using colour tactics, moreso than a colour strategy.
Intuition and on the spot decision making can be integral to my process, when I mix the next colour in response to seeing the previous layers printed. I frequently change the colour on my ink slab as I am printing, making micro adjustments to value or hue that results in producing editions that are split between 4 or more different colour schemes. What I learn in this process is that my original intuition when making these choices is often the right one, and that while my desire to work this way fails to produce edition sizes that make sense, I am at least confident that I stuck the landing, and the right ones are indeed the best. Colour trial proofing could also get me there, but I simply have no patience for that process.
I should also mention that I mock up a great many colour schemes by photographing my colour separation drawings and importing them to Photoshop. I imagine many of you reading this already know it is a strategy that comes with it’s own problems, as colours on a backlit screen do not translate easily to the way printing ink sits on paper and absorbs the ambient light. I take these mockups with a large grain of salt... but I do find the process useful as a starting point.
“The ability to make micro-adjustments to hue, saturation, value, and opacity while at the press has shown me that printmaking media can have a significant impact on the way a work resolves itself.”
Environment, 30x40in., lithograph, 2017
Moderate Men, 30x40in., lithograph and screenprint, 2017
What can printmaking ink achieve regarding color in your work that no other material can?
This is a great question, to which I find articulating an answer quite challenging. When I use printmaking inks that are derived from high quality pigments, and are carried by a well tuned ink body, the ink interacts with paper, light, and with the colours that surround it, in a manner superior to and richer than any digital facsimiles I have seen of similar images. The ability to make micro-adjustments to hue, saturation, value, and opacity while at the press has shown me that printmaking media can have a significant impact on the way a work resolves itself.
People who use paint and intimately “know” painting will be familiar with those phenomena, though for whatever reason it seems easier for others to grasp when it comes to painting. Perhaps this is because the immediate acts of painting - building layers, altering opacity, removing through scraping, sanding away, creating texture, etc. - are acts born of human impulse and tied immediately to a very human gesture. They quite literally embody the dance between painter and paint in the give-and-take process of building an image.
Without disrespecting painters, I like to point out that those who make prints dance as well... we just have a lot of artifice to contend with when choosing our steps. The way I construct a colour print is tied directly to the ink, because part of the process is responding to the problem of the media itself. Were I to paint my imagery instead, I'm certain they would look nothing like my prints do.
Getting back to the original question though - I like to believe that even if someone who views my work may not see the intricacies of the way light refracts differently on a lithograph versus a commercially produced screen print or inkjet print, there is something inherently unique about the way I constructed the image because I had to respond to the problem of the discipline I am working in and the media it requires. I make different choices when I make a lithograph versus when I make a screen print or an intaglio print because I know those materials can and will behave differently. The art work is shaped by my anticipation of and reactions to those differences.
“Since the advent of colour printing - and particularly colour lithography in Europe and North America - there has been a complex science behind the way colour is employed to capture attention, and how it can evoke a tone of voice sympathetic to the agenda of those doing the persuading.”
How does the printmaking process itself relate to how you work with color?
For about a decade I have been creating large lithographic works that emulate state-sponsored propaganda and advertisements of the earlier half of the 20th century. Since the advent of colour printing - and particularly colour lithography in Europe and North America - there has been a complex science behind the way colour is employed to capture attention, and how it can evoke a tone of voice sympathetic to the agenda of those doing the persuading.
Different types of appeals involve different colour schemes. Many wartime illustrators found ways to embed their national colours into the colour scheme of their propaganda posters. Other illustrators were limited by a short number of press runs, where the overlap of relatively few transparent colours could achieve surprising amounts of variation, or when the use of splatter techniques (and eventually the employment of half-tone dots) achieved a range of value, all despite access to a limited palette.
When artists like Jules Cheret began creating large scale, colourful posters, efficiency of production was front of mind, and so doing a lot with a limited colour palette was important. The use of primary colours and establishing contrast in value though the use of color compliments typifies the strategies used in this early era of the poster. I spend a lot of time looking at these early poster works, both online and in-person whenever I am able to access museum archives and private collections. I pay attention to how the pigment in the inks has faded over time, how blacks become brown or purple, how reds become faint pinks. I attempt to employ some of these same colour strategies in hopes of tapping into what we recognize today as one aspect of the nostalgic essence of the originals.
Soil, 30x40in., lithograph and screenprint, 2016