“What about other printmakers?”, said Franco, as we sat around his vaulted dining room table in an ancient Tuscan castle.
We’d come to Two Cents Press in Serrazzano, Italy, for a week in April, hosted by printmaker Franco Marinai, to print an edition of our box, and to be inspired by Franco, by the environment, and by the Italian countryside. Franco welcomed us to the village with a lasagna supper, and we spent the evening talking about our backgrounds, our nascent journey as printmakers, and his decades long, wide-ranging experience as an artist and boundary-breaker.
Franco went on. Printmakers might make an enthusiastic audience for our This Box is for Good boxes, he suggested, as they would appreciate the craft, already have a tradition of “print exchanges” (so would understand the generosity), and might be inclined to include creations of their own in the boxes to pass on to others.
“Printmakers,” we thought, “yes.” But how to find them?
The UK magazine Pressing Matters first came to our attention last year, through Frab’s Magazines in Italy. Each issue of the magazine is a visual delight, and I ordered a couple of back issues, thinking they might inspire my letterpress practice. Little did we know, long before we’d flung ourselves into a life of printmaking, that, a year later, that these would be “our people,” and the magazine the visual journal of record.
Returning to Canada after that European trip this spring, we sent a June box to publisher John Coe, and John, after receiving it, generously proposed including a small piece about the project in an upcoming issue.
Issue 28 was just published, and features this piece, highlighting our April collaboration with Dutch printmaker Roy Scholten.
We’re happy and proud to have our project go out into an audience of “our people,” and are eager to see their response.