Master printer teaches workshop, unveils PRINT
A bit of serendipity brought master printmaker Richard Duardo to Shreveport. After a happenstance on an airplane with William Joyce, Moonbot Studios co-founder, Duardo found himself interested in visiting Shreveport. Brandon Oldenburg, artistic director of the UNSCENE! festival and co-founder of Moonbot Studios, sealed the visit, having Duardo agree to teach a two-day workshop with five local artists specially selected to watch a printmaking lesson and also bring PRINT, an exhibition produced by world-renowned artists created in Duardo’s studio, Modern Multiples.
Duardo is most known for his title as the “Warhol of the West.”
“It makes it easy for people to understand the work I do because most everyone knows [Andy] Warhol. He is known for appropriating imagery and blowing it up and you think silk screening as a medium of reproduction, so I’ve kind of been doing that,” Duardo said. “But mine is a little bit more decorative. With mine, I incorporate a lot more color and composition. So I guess you could say that I am a decorative Warhol.”
Duardo met with Warhol in New York in 1978, and he gave Duardo a critique of his early work.
“I was young and pretty naive, but I wouldn’t do silly things like that today. I’m uptight like most adults,” Duardo said. “He found it novel and kind of naive that I did that and so it was kind of amusing to him.”
It was through Warhol that he met Keith Haring, one of the first graffiti artists in New York, and started to build an area in Los Angeles for printmaking.
“I became a base in Los Angeles for some of these young artists to come over and hang out or stay at my place. So there was a real New York – Los Angles connection, while I was doing prints. And so I started inviting artists to do work,” Duardo said.
Duardo met with Shepard Ferry, widely known for created the Barack Obama “Hope” image for the 2008 campaign.
“He came over and said, ‘Richard, we are doing this idea, and I am going to proof out for the Obama campaign.’ So we didn’t run the production,” Duardo said. “We just kind of assisted. He uses our studio to work out ideas before he determines whether or not he is going to do an edition.”
Duardo said a lot factors attract artists to printmaking.
“[Printmaking] has actually gone through another renaissance with young artists because it is the most egalitarian, democratizing medium for artists to replicate their work and make it financially accessible to young people or young collectors,” Duardo said. “So it is kind of a propagating media for getting their work out there. And now that the Internet exists that is now another way to make inaccessible accessible to collectors, not just locally, regionally but globally. That is how some of these artists have blown up so massively.”
In Shreveport, Duardo wanted to affect as many local artists as possible by teaching a workshop at artspace.
“What I am going to show them are kamikaze printing sessions with each of them that show them some techniques from the way that I work, that will allow them to work fast and furious,” Duardo said.
Local artists Ben Moss, Jeormie Journell, Jeremy Johnson, John H. Lomax and Taffie Garsee were eager to watch Duardo in action.
Of the artists, Ben Moss wanted to learn how to set up his own print making shop.
“[I want] to just be able to get an idea out there quickly,” Moss said. “It’s really good for mass-producing something and getting it done fast, and all of a sudden you are up somewhere.”
–Staff report
SEE THE ART
PRINT will be on display through Oct. 12 at artspace. To learn more about Richard Duardo, go to modernmultiples.com.
