"El Gallinero"–An Artists' & Writers' Refuge in Granada

“Behemoth and Leviathan,” a print by William Blake

What’s a Gallinero? And why would you want to stay there?

Printmakers Like Rabbits Stunned in Headlight Beams

At left, “Behemoth and Leviathan” by William Blake–Fine-art printmakers today are facing challenges of sea-change magnitude. The very existence of printmaking as we know it is at stake. The issue, of course, is digital and we should have seen it coming. In fact, many of us did but remained inert, like rabbits stunned in headlight beams. “Digital” has been everybody’s issue since the electronic scientific calculator replaced the slide rule in the mid 1970s. Computers changed everything. They brought us an ever-growing set of delightful mod cons but along the way they took a terrible toll on printmaking, threatening print artists’ livelihoods forever.

Thanks to digital innovations artists who have always made their livings creating and selling hand-pulled prints must now compete with images created in inexpensive unlimited series using digital copying technology. The operative word here is “copy,” though funnily enough it almost never appears in the sales pitches. There the digital copiers prefer to refer to their ware coyly as “giclee prints.” The term “giclee” is a recent invention, essentially meaningless hype when applied to fine art, but to the uninitiated it sounds chic in the way “call girl” does when referring to whores. Read more…