When I was first approached by Eru Narayana to look at his work and to listen to his tapes I was asked to do so in reference to the potential for a collaboration between himself and my studio. And so I sat with the work, and I listened to his voice while he was walking and I realized that by walking Eru understood walking as did those wonderful thinkers in the past like Rousseau and Kant who tickled us with what early humankind may have been like, and Nietzsche and Jack Kerouac who were also prolific walkers. Not that these thinkers liked to take walks as in strolls. Rather they walked 1000s of kilometers and quite often. In fact, they were the type of walkers one wonders when and how they had time to work.
But, they wrote that much of what they published was a result of walking. The meditative state. And I understand this state because I am an endurance cyclist and although not walking for months on end, I do cycle for 1000s of kms at a time and sleep on the ground for a month and wonder myself how I have enough time to do everything that it is that I do. Yet, I do not believe I am a thinker as much as I believe I am an alchemist, and it is that time cycling through a world for days on days that much of my own original thinking have been born.
Eru, on the other hand, through walking, found in his world he could be visited not by ideas which are constantly swirling around the world waiting for souls to latch onto them. He was a diviner to spirits which swirl around the world trying to connect to a soul for whatever divine purposes they have. He is a seeker and a seer. And he tells his story and theirs in a way that fascinated me because I have been close to that world through others. And I have found myself on many occasions entering into worlds that both scared and fascinated me because of the confrontations I had with myself and past selfs which I share some DNA with.
So, when listening to a tape that Eru had made for me, had asked me to listen to, had asked me to be open to, I considered what medium I could offer that might offer me the same endurance and difficulty of his walking. What medium can be fraught with peril and accident and requires a struggle and all of the other types of difficulties one encounters walking such long distances? It occurred to me that we do not see a lot of four color CMYK photogravures. We do not because they are difficult to pull off. And when we do see them they are often small. I imagined what might it be to try and pull off a very large color photogravure from four plates, dealing with the stretching of paper, the fact that each subsequent printing removes some ink from the previous printing, and that it all had to come together to make a strong representation of his work.
Initially I thought it too difficult with large 30×40 plates and there must be a reason why it’s just not being done. Then I thought well that’s the point isn’t it. Eru is not walking because it’ easy or he knows what he will encounter. He sets off on his journey into the unexpected and so should I. So, we’ve settled on producing his one-off prints as a complex four plate CMYK photogravures. The paper we will use is Moulin du Gué 350gsm, a lovely mixture of cotton and flax with the look and feel of a handmade sheet. It is made on a cylinder mould, acid-free, without any optical brighteners. It has an artisan look and feel and is one of the most beautiful and archival printmaking papers available.
I have been involved in some extraordinary print projects. It took me three years to complete Richard Avedon’s last living portfolio, and two years to complete Gordon Park’s retrospective prints for the Hirshorn Museum. And I lived and worked along side Gregory Colbert to produce his enormous Nomadic Museum exhibitions of the Ashes and Snow prints. These in particular were seen by more than 13 million people making it the most viewed exhibition in history. But Eru’s concept of one print and one holder of that print is both novel and brings the process into a possibility of collaboration between artist, printmaker, and the holder of the print. It is to me an extraordinary opportunity to make art history.
بَيانٌ مِنْ جون كون حَوْلَ كَيْفِيَّةِ طِباعَةِ الأَعْمالِ الفَنِّيَّةِ مِن قِبَلِ إِرُو نارايانا
