Thursday, December 17, 2009

Print Collection 1


My Morning Jacket Plays the Tennessee Fire
Triangle Poster CO.
Pittsburgh, PA
Screenprint and/or Letterpress

When I was younger my friends and I would load up the car and head down to Bardstown Rd. where we would wander around and check out the stores, hang out and have a good time. During these days there were no social networking sites so if you expected someone to come see your show, you had to make real life flyers, and stick them to real life telephone poles. If I would see a really well designed flyer while walking around, I would sometimes take them from the poles.

This is where I got this print. I dare say it is the first print in my collection, even though I took less than great care with it. It has pin holes in it, and drawing on the back, but when this poster was printed I highly doubt it was created to be "high art" and the whole gig poster/printmaking fad hadn't yet arrived.

The band is one I had never heard of when I acquired the print, but recently had appeared on TV's American Dad, and I believe they also had a live concert on television for New Year's Eve 2008/2009. The popularity of the band as well as the trendiness of printmaking and gig posters makes me wonder how long a poster like this would have survived stuck to a pole these days. This same poster I took from the streets is actually for sale(or was at one time) at Ear X-tacy.

When I found this print I had no knowledge about printmaking. I didn't know who Andy Warhol was, I had never been to Hatch Show Print, and I had probably never even had any experience in my high school art classes, but this was a cool poster. The paper was thick, the colors were bright, but it had a certain hand made quality that normal posters did not. I could see the impressions in the lettering, I could see slight imperfections, and the ink seemed to sit on top of the paper more than normal posters.

Based on my printmaking knowledge I would say this poster is a combination of screenprinting and letterpress. The image at the bottom seems to be a generic screenprinted design that is available for everyone and the text at the top seems to be a letterpressed custom design. If you visit the Triangle poster company website they have pictures of pre-printed images that you ca use for your event, and this is one of them. This particular elephant image is "style #531" according to the bottom of the poster.

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