You're Invited to the GBSS One Year Anniversary Celebration!

Announcing our One Year Anniversary Reception! Saturday, March 7, we will be hosting a studio visit and reception to celebrate our one year anniversary. Last year we had a great turn out for our Grand Opening, and we would love to have you over to the studio to see what we've been up to since. There are so many things that we'd like to share with you. We try to keep the blog and website updated with most of the news, but it just isn't a good substitute for being in the studio. At our reception, we can share more with you over some hors d'oeuvres, recent artwork, good company and of course our new press! We'll have recent artwork on display by Jenn Bushman, Erich Boldt, Matt Duckett, Susan Timm and Lisa Ulik. Come celebrate with us and hang out with artists from the studio and the community!

Well, we've finished our restoration of the press. I know, we seem to do everything in obsessively quick bursts--Lansing, MI and back in 27 hrs., restore a press in a couple days--but it's a passion, you know? We buffed out those rollers, threw on a new coat of paint where it was needed, and got those casters installed. It's probably a good thing I lost those pictures of Jenn cleaning the press with a Q-Tip, or you might think our obsession is getting out of hand (but it happened). We scrubbed it down, got the casters on, and put it back together. We even ran a couple test prints through just to get out some of our giddiness. If this got you excited, we'd love to have you over some time to pull some prints and help us break in our new press. If you don't feel like making prints, or intaglio isn't your thing, we'd love to have you in anyway. How about our One Year Anniversary reception?

The New Press in Town

And the state, for that matter.

Alternate Title: A Press Hot off the Road....

Well, we just brought our new Wright Combo press home. It was a crazy weekend road trip over 1,000 miles of lake effected, State of Indiana-neglected roads.

We purchased the press from a wonderful artist couple in Lansing, MI. Anne is a printmaker, but hasn't been printing intaglio for some time now. They wanted to see that the press found a good home where it would be used regularly, and GBSS certainly fits the bill. It was amazing to meet Anne and Greg. Flipping through a photo album of the day they brought home the press originally, we were all struck by how similar the spirit was between these Michigan artists from 1978 and our own stable of Wisconsin artists thirty years later. We couldn't have found a more perfect couple of people to buy the press from, nor a nicer one. Not only did they provide us with a great press with its own unique history, they also loaded us up with gear (and donuts!). They threw in blankets, blotters, inks, a box full of books, oil paint--everything we could carry. Even refills on our coffee!

The press was built by a blueberry farmer from Grand Junction, MI. He was also a metalworker, and teamed with the more famous Dickerson--one of the oldest pressmakers in the States. Wright went on to make some presses on his own for a bit, which is the pedigree our press comes from.

It was an intense roadtrip, during which we learn many things about the words and became much wiser and tired-er. We learned that Indiana has crappy roads (sorry IN, but it was brutal hauling a 600 lb trailer across that meteor-impact-crater of a highway system. To be fair, I've driven across other parts of IN that weren't so rocky). We learned that 99% of IL toll booth operators are jovial, kind-hearted folk who love to share tax advice with you. We learned (at 3:30 in the morning while checking into a hotel) that Michigan is in the Eastern Time Zone (whoops, make that 4:30).

We left La Crosse at 6:30 pm on Friday, and were back in town at 9:30 on Saturday. That's about 18 hours of driving in 27 hours, with approximately 2 hours of press-lifting and three hours of sleeping, and around a half-hour of kid-in-a-candy-store giddiness in Greg's art supply shop.

We don't have a whole lot of pictures, since most of our dirving was in the dark. There wasn't a lot of things to take pictures of, beyond the seemingly random, gigantic shards of rusted steel embedded in the Indiana landscape and the capitol building of RoboCop's home state, in the shadow of which our press sat for about 15 years (the capitol, not Ofc. Murphy).

Once we got our press home, we began the process of restoring it to its former glory. The rollers were a bit corroded, and it was generally in need of a good cleaning. You can see in the pictures the progress we made on the rollers. I had a number of pictures of the press before we started working on it, but somehow all 20-30 of the images were 'corrupted.' So here is the press after a few hours of work. The top roller has been buffed quite a bit; from the bottom one you can see the rollers before we began (the top one wasn't quite as tarnished).













Here's a close up of a roller before we started our work. The rollers are threaded, which gives them traction as the blankets roll underneath them. It is important that we maintain these fine grooves as we buff out the rust.







We still have a little way to go on the rollers, but the rest of the press is coming along nicely. We'll likely be installing shelves in the press bench, and maybe some drying racks. We also installed casters on the bench in order to save space and keep some adaptability to our space for events and classes and such.

Stay tuned to check out our progress!