Well, really, this is about what we invited someone else to do on his summer vacation. Visiting Artist David Wolske spent much of his free time this summer traveling from his home near Indiana University, where he teaches graphic design and letterpress printing, and is a printmaker, to Nashville, to carry out an ambitious body of work using the largest type we have in the shop.
We call this type our two-sheet font, because it takes two pieces of paper to print one letter. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the largest sheet size paper was approximately thirty by forty inches, so the printing presses and printing blocks were made to accommodate those dimensions. Each letter of this font is made up of two blocks, and each block is twenty five inches wide and forty inches tall, so that one printed letter is eighty inches tall.
David developed a series of prints, each printed with just three colors and three half-letters, that celebrate the letterforms in seven colors and countless new shapes.
Join us this Saturday, October 1, for the First Saturday Art Crawl, to view all six different prints, as well as smaller works created with the same keen eye for form and color, from 6 – 9 pm, in Hatch Show Print’s Haley Gallery.