Greg Shattenberg has spent his life communicating through his art. But if you ask him about the meaning behind a piece of artwork, don’t expect a straight answer.
“Private ideas have a lot of power to them,” he said. “Sometimes the intent (of a piece) can be loose. And sometimes I make something up. I keep it private.”
Shattenberg, a fine art printmaker, runs five different types of printing presses in his studio on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Auburn.
His current work consists of intaglio prints of images of plants overlayed with text inspired by James Joyce’s writings. He reads and he ruminates. As particular passages strike him, he underlines and circles. Shattenberg then reworks the phrasing, changing tenses and tweaking passages.
“I like things to be in present tense,” he said. “I think of the art experience as something happening in the present tense.”
He experiments with changing the text from a single voice to two voices. He casts individual letters with molten metal and arranges them into passages, then prints them on a letter press printing press. He further rearranges, cutting the newly printed passages apart with scissors and eventually drawing them out of a hat to reorder them.
“Language is a lot more difficult than the image,” Shattenberg said.“Images can fall right out of me.”
The images come from months of drawing. The series he is currently working on utilizes intaglio, a printing method of scratching an image onto a copper plate with tools, covering the plate with ink, wiping off the surface, and finally running the plate through a special press.
“With intaglio, you print on the lower parts of the plate versus the top of the plate,” Shattenberg said.
He creates the first layer of the print with green ink and a second with black ink, clearing microscopically varying degrees of ink off different parts of the same plate for each pass.
A sheet of dampened art paper and the inked copper plate are positioned between two felt sheets and compressed together through the intaglio press. Shattenberg repeats this process in the proofing stage dozens of time for each print until he gets the look and feel of the image exactly as he wants it.
“When it gets to be an adventure is when I go to edition it,” he said. “You end up getting very sensitive, just through the process of replication, to what the ink is doing on the surface.”
Once Shattenberg is satisfied with the look of the proof, he begins the laborious process of editioning, printing the image repeatedly with exactly the same layers of ink.
When asked about the feelings or motivation behind each of his pieces, Shattenberg declined, instead responding, “In this past year, with the political world, language has changed. I started looking at it: Personal stuff and political stuff is pretty interchangeable. I was surprised how interchangeable it was.”
He offers up clues through the titles of his prints. “Tanked.” “Avid Emotionalist.” “Visions.” “Calculations.” “Soul.”
He takes these personal/political thoughts and overlays them with drawings of plants.
“If I were to use a person or an animal, it would look goofy,” he said. “But I can do the exact same thing with plants and you can slide it under the door, and nobody catches it.”
Shattenberg’s work can be seen in a solo exhibition at Kimball Street Studios. The opening reception will coincide with the L/A Arts Artwalk on Friday, Aug. 18.
