Triple Diesel

The TD crew completed an inkjet print for an upcoming project. Inkjet printing, formerly called "giclee" - French for "spray" or "squirt" - has made its way forward from cheap, high-edition printing to unique, prestigious art. Justin Lowe's current show in Italy features several inkjet "paintings" on canvas; Peter Coffin exhibited an inkjet print of a newspaper ad in L.A.; Kelley Walker sold inkjet prints - and digital files - at Paula Cooper; Guyton/Walker did at Greene Naftali, too; Richard Prince's Nurse paintings; Jorge Pardo - and who can count the photographers making inkjet prints, the archival inks of which can outlast C-prints?

Of course, our project was an edition and not a unique product, which makes it like a deskilled print.

We started with a drawing on paper, 22" x 30." The final print would be on paper that size, although the printed area would be smaller. Our drawing was too big for a flatbed scanner; scanning each quarter and reassembling in Photoshop was a failure. Nothing lined up correctly. So a friend shot 35mm slides, which we thought we'd run through a slide scanner.

But it turns out that for our output dimensions, a 4x5" transparency would be more successful. We got one, took this to Duggal for a drum scan, and received a tiff file 7565 x 9963 pixels, which at 300 dpi means 215.6 MB! Big.

Then we went to see another friend who has a huge Epson printer, like as wide as an SUV. The seven prints took 2.5 - 3 hours, time killed with chocolate-covered pretzels, Stella Artois, and iTunes.