Meet The Little Friends of Printmaking: Illustrators/Printmakers/Designers

We had the good fortune of connecting with The Little Friends of Printmaking and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi The Little Friends, we’d love to hear more about your end-goal, professionally.
We would like to make and sell prints for as long as we can physically do it. We recognize how grim that sounds, but it is truly such a source of joy in our lives. We were stuck in our studio through the pandemic, and while it should have been miserable, we actually had a lot of fun. It reoriented our thinking about our career, and we started to envision a dream future without deadlines where we just design, make, and sell prints (in a little house, preferably surrounded by cats and potted plants). We’d also love to continue to make children’s books, so I guess we’ll have to allow a few deadlines into our little perfect bubble of pure printmaking.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
We’re silkscreen artists, first and foremost. Sure, we work as illustrators and art directors and designers– and we love the work that we do. But silkscreen is the core of our practice, and we’ve spent the past few years trying to help people understand what we find so special about print in general (and silkscreen specifically). We try to do that in big ways, like through our ongoing series of printing process videos on social media, watched by hundreds of thousands. We also try to do that in teeny-tiny ways, like the little stamp on the back of each of our prints that says “Hand-Printed in California.” Just a tiny little gesture like that goes a long way to remind people that they’re holding a real handmade thing. Then, maybe they take a step back and start to consider what makes a silkscreen print so special in the first place, whether it’s the color saturation or the luminosity or the textures or the ingenuity of the design or this or that. (We could truly go on all day.) The process videos were definitely a game changer for us. They opened us up to a whole different audience. People have a seemingly endless appetite for internet videos in which someone is calmly making something (in expert fashion), preferably to a soundtrack of chilled-out music. Meanwhile, here we were in our studio, making prints and listening to chilled-out music, and eventually the penny dropped that we should be doing this ourselves. Now, we joke that Little Friends is a internet video content mill that also occasionally produces artwork. Through the videos, people are watching us produce our work and so they are engaging with it on a different level. The videos also feel like a natural extension of the work we’ve done as lecturers at colleges and universities. We’ll post a video in the morning and spend the afternoon fielding technical silkscreen questions from students and hobbyists around the world. It’s like a virtual office hours, and we love it. We can’t get enough. If the first ten years of our career were about two fine art snots trying to prove they belonged in the world of design, the last ten years have been about turning around and convincing the design world that silkscreen is worthwhile. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
We don’t like to do exciting things—That’s why we live in Pasadena! If you came to visit us from out of town, we’d try to hit the PCC Flea Market. It’s free, unlike the Rose Bowl Flea, and has most of the same vendors one week earlier. We get a lot of design ideas from weird old stuff we pick up at the flea, and even if you don’t find anything you want to buy, poking through stuff while eating an Italian ice is a pretty good way to spend an afternoon. Then, maybe some real Old California, Huell Howser-type stuff, like Galco’s Soda Pop Shoppe on York Boulevard or Casa Bianca Pizza Pie on Colorado. If you have a nightmare out-of-town visitor who insists on going to Hollywood & Highland, at least you can take them to see a movie at the Chinese Theatre, which is a transcendent moviegoing experience. If the movie is lousy, just stare at the art deco ceiling for 90 minutes. Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We were living in Milwaukee and went to see a lecture by the artist and gallerist Sara Daleiden. The lecture was about the history of art squats and punk houses in America. It was a great lecture, and we ended up talking for a long time afterwards and exchanging information. We’d mentioned to her that we were considering moving to L.A., but that we still had our doubts. Maybe we wouldn’t “stick,” maybe the city would reject us like a transplanted spleen, whatever. Sara was running an artist-in-residence program here at the time, and she offered us a month’s stay at her space. And, perhaps, we could use the residency as sort of a safe landing spot in the city and find our bearings. It made all the difference for us. It made it feel official. We were really going to uproot our entire life and do the damn thing. And then, once you’re here, you’re here. Why would you ever leave? What a laughable thought!

Website: http://thelittlefriendsofprintmaking.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlefriendsof/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/littlefriendsof

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