KUPU - Word prints by Weston Frizzell

Kupu Print by Weston Frizzell

"Kupu" Maori noun. Definition/translation into English "Word".

In 2009 Weston Frizzell began exploring and remixing the iconography of NZ fine art and popular culture into the letter series, a suite of prints that rearranged letters appropriated from iconic NZ artworks by artists such as Colin McCahon and brands, for example Watties and L&P.  The first word prints produced were those perceived by the artists as the most prominent in the kiwiana genre of decorative art, Aotearoa, Aroha and Home.

For the second series of word prints the initial intention was to create artworks montaging images of the letter paintings to form a series of words specific to the location of each destination of a touring show.  Taupo was the first of this series (in an edition of 10 that has now sold out).  The release of today's suite is arranged around a choice of letters specifically restricted to those of the written Maori language again with visual subject matter limited to NZ only. The prints are "Kupu", "Mate", "Pakeha", "Kapow" and "AEIOU".

Working backwards from the answer, Weston Frizzell conceived print designs that combine letters from a painted series. The individual letters are realised as 800 x 1200mm painted artworks, then images of the completed paintings were digitally captured, and the files assembled to create the final digital master files. Weston Frizzell regard the final work as not derivative of the painting process. The inverse is true. The paintings are regarded as artifacts of the creation of a digital print!

Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston signing the new prints
at their Auckland studio

Who is Weston Frizzell? We have written before about differentiating your Frizzells, but in essence Weston Frizzell is the collaborative identity of artists Otis Frizzell and Mike Weston. An experiment in the subversion of brand management theory that has evolved into a successful and frequently controversial art identity (see for example the controversy over their Auckland Supercity logo or Weston Frizzell ask "Who are the real terrorists?"), Weston Frizzell occupy a cleverly conceived niche that is now well established on the NZ fine art stage.  

All of the Kupu work can be seen at the touring exhibtion of Weston Frizzell prints and paintings produced by Th'ink and The Area, check the show out in Wellington at Thistle Hall, 293 Cuba St 29 July - 4 August 2013 and at the International Visual Methods Conference at Victoria University 2 September to 6 September.  Kupu moves to Auckland at Augusto, 90 Wellesley St 20 August to 25 August and then onto Melbourne at Second Story, 159 Sackville St, Collingwood 23 September to October 6th.

NZ Fine Prints sells gallery's land to the Crown

New Zealand Fine Prints and associated companies (such as Capper Press and Avon Fine Prints) moved into the old Royal Exchange Assurance building at 202 Hereford St in the Christchurch CBD from cramped quarters above the National Party offices in Tuam St. It was the end of the 1960s and staff numbers were growing with projects like "Captain Cook's Artists in the Pacific" in full swing.  For nearly fifty years the 1890's era warehouses at the rear of the site was packed full of books and prints and the 1920s two storied building facing Hereford St comprised gallery and office space.

After September 4 2010 we spent well into six figures on temporary repairs and because of this early warning we were extremely fortunate that no-one was injured or killed although February 22nd 2011's earthquake damaged both buildings beyond repair.

Because such a large proportion of our business is now online (New Zealand Fine Prints is behind NZ's largest art print and poster site - prints.co.nz) the physical destruction of our buildings was, we thought, a temporary setback - an opportunity even to rethink the design of our buildings to relate better to other businesses on our block with a more pedestrian friendly access from Cashel St, Liverpool St and Woolsack Lane.   Our plan had always been to redevelop the site over time, preserving the character of the buildings in a central city location with plenty of parking with our unique business offering the largest range of prints in NZ as the anchor tenant.  We were not property developers, ours was a staged development intended to keep 202 Hereford maintained and economically viable for the next generation above all else.

When the Crown announced that our land was going to be seized for the so called green frame our initial reaction was disbelief.  But today we are announcing that along with many other CBD property owners we have been steamrolled by the Crown into accepting their offer for our land.  For an owner occupier with a sentimental attachment to our family's land we would never have sold our land at the low price offered by the Crown in the open market.  The idea that we are a willing seller is ridiculous as with only a single buyer and the threat of compulsory acquisition hanging over us we simply had no choice but to accept.

The ghostly outline of NZ Fine Prints' old gallery after demolition

Our main shopfront may be online but central to the DNA of our business is our love of NZ's visual culture and history, a sense of connectedness that is rooted in a specific geographic location.  The internet is ephemeral, a stock room piled high with packs of art prints on hundreds of shelves is tangible, even if a customer had never visited us they knew that behind the online gallery lay a family run business that had been around for a long time in one place.

Freed from a physical location (we may have been 2 1/2 years in Cashmere but it still feels transitional) we have renewed our focus on growing the online side of the business but despite the exponential growth that a website offers in terms of extra sales for our artists we are very sad that we are not being allowed to rebuild on our completely undamaged land (our place is being taken by a lawn).

It is businesses like NZ Fine Prints that make a central city different.  Taking our land away from us and imposing a top down plan on the rebuild of the CBD removes the entrepreneurial skills that the businesses around us had to make our block work with the hand the earthquakes dealt us.  NZ Fine Prints were also committed to the rebuild (trapped even) and prepared to invest more than a developer would based purely on the numbers as we had a sentimental attachment to making this patch of Christchurch awesome for our kids even if we didn't make much back financially for twenty years.

New location - look out for JK's kiwi sign
on Hackthorne Rd just past the school.

While we assess the options for a future site of a gallery, stockroom and warehousing we have made the decision to stay in our temporary premises (we are working from the basement of a classic Cashmere character house opening out into a superb garden with views across Christchurch, it's pretty nice here if a little quiet compared to the CBD) for at least another year while we wait and see what happens with the rebuild.

Customers looking for prints who are in Christchurch are always welcome to visit us, we now have nearly all prints back on one site thanks to some pretty innovative shelving (our prints are now double and triple bunked instead of luxuriating on a shelf of their own) although we are not carrying quite so many framed prints in stock framing to order within a few days instead.

The fact that the Crown will be packaging up our land for re-sale in the future without possibility of us buying it back at the same price seems really unfair and why businesses got such a harsh deal compared to property owners in residential neighbourhoods where the land was damaged (full payout of GV plus demolition costs) are the two things that we continue to feel bitter about. However we have decided to just give up and move on, lets hope the bureaucrats from Wellington flying down here each week know what they are doing with Christchurch.

Next Art Prints, Posters & Limited Editions Catalogue - Sneak Peek

We have completed the difficult but enjoyable task of selecting and cataloging just over 500 fine art prints, posters and limited editions for the next New Zealand Fine Prints free mail order catalogue.

Here is a sneak peek at our 2014 catalogue in PDF form (although we have compressed it to 8MB it will take a few seconds to download).

Click here to download Catalogue (PDF)

Printed free versions of this catalogue will be available from early July. Please let us know if you spot any errors before we send this final draft off to the printers!

Saluting a NZ art publishing success as Grahame Sydney quits prints

Nighthouse II by Grahame Sydney

New Zealand's most successful art publishing collaboration of the past two decades is coming to an end.  We have been told by Christchurch publisher Image Vault that immensely popular contemporary NZ landscape painter Grahame Sydney is withdrawing copyright permission to reproduce his paintings digitally (so called giclee printing) and we understand that other editions previously available as off-set only will not be re-printed once these sell out.  This affects several popular titles immediately that are printed digitally - including Nighthouse II, Evening at Ben Ohau and Albatross at Deborah Bay which will no longer be available once our stock on the shelf is sold - and the other titles will progressively be discontinued by NZ Fine Prints as the publisher deletes them.

This marks the beginning of the end of one of the most successful publishing relationships in our industry's history as for several of these past few years Grahame Sydney was the top selling NZ artist for New Zealand's galleries, picture framers and other retailers selling prints.

Grahame initially self-published prints in the late 1970s - reproducing his paintings Rozzie at Pisa,

Evening at Ben Ohau by Grahame Sydney

Dog Trials Room, Auripo Rd and Wilson's Boys Boat [when you see an interior shot of Sydney's house on television or in a magazine the image of Rozzie at Pisa on the wall is actually one of these prints - the original is in the national collection at Te Papa!].  The first editions in the Grahame Sydney series from "Image Vault at Windsor Gallery" date back to before the time the Secker's sold the gallery to concentrate on printing and publishing under the Image Vault brand.  The "Grahame Sydney Series" (that eventually numbered prints of over 50 different paintings) was one of the foundation publishing projects of Jane and Nathan Secker back in the days that they still worked at the family owned Windsor Gallery in High St, Christchurch. This writer remembers collecting bundles of these first prints wrapped in brown paper after climbing the narrow stairs to where the Secker's embryonic publishing company occupied a warren of small rooms above Windsor Gallery in an old building now demolished following the Christchurch earthquakes! 

Tens of thousands of Grahame Sydney prints were sold during the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s with Grahame's original paintings climbing in value as well in no small part due to the wider appreciation of his work that large scale reproduction delivered. Grahame's contemporary realistic (but, he insisted, never photographic!) scenes fell comfortably into the tradition of New Zealander's decorating with landscapes devoid of people but with their modern more lightfast inks and large format they showed a clear technical advance from prints printed in NZ in the 1970s and 80s for print purchasers (until Image Vault began printing using wide format inkjet printers in-house all the Sydney prints were printed using off-set lithography by Christchurch's Rainbow Print).  

The Sydney series was a publishing milestone - the first time that a single contemporary NZ artist had had such a large number of paintings reproduced and simultaneously released as art cards, mini prints etc. It also marked a change in the distribution model to a complete framed product being sold into non traditional retail outlets such as gift and furniture stores rather than unframed prints via small owner operated frame shops ordering for customers via catalogue.

Albatross at Deborah Bay by Grahame Sydney

We will certainly miss stocking prints by Grahame Sydney but we'd like to take this opportunity to offer our congratulations to the artist, publisher and printer for creating one of the most successful art print publishing partnerships in our industry's history. Well done! 

Illustrating this article are the first three Grahame Sydney prints that we have had to move into our "endangered" gallery today (our collection of prints about to sell out) - we have between five and twenty copies of these titles left in stock today (early June 2013).  As always please order promptly to avoid disappointment as once these prints have sold they will not be available to buy again.

Artist Print or Reproduction Print? Spotting the difference in the era of Digital Printmaking

Are Prints by Digital Printmakers Reproductions or Original Artists' Prints?

Prints created on a computer or printed using an inkjet printer (the giclee process) can sometimes be classified as an "original" or "artists" print, just like a print made using a more traditional process such as etching or handmade silkscreens.  We agree with artist David Hockney who says bluntly "the computer is just a tool" and exhibits inkjet (or giclee) prints drawn on a graphics pad because clearly the image only exists in printed form, there is no "original" therefore it is an original work of art (in multiple form).

However many high priced digitally produced prints are not original prints, they are (albeit very high quality) reproductions.

When giclee/digital prints first appeared the high cost of materials and hardware created a blurring of the price signal differentiation between artists prints and reproduction prints. The print buyer was also paying for a higher quality product than an offset print (in terms of longevity of inks, colour fidelity and the option of reproduction onto canvas as well as fine art paper) but the prices for early digital prints were often further amplified by the premium for a more exclusive reproduction, the infiintely flexible "limited edition" being exploited by early adopters of the giclee printing process who were reproducing paintings.

Original digital print by NZ printmaker Alec Tayler

High prices being asked for  reproduction giclee prints has made the path for acceptance of pioneering digital printmakers like NZ's Alec Tayler just that much tougher. Tayler's work passes all the tests for an original artists' print but at $350 (for an edition of 180) they are still priced below some reproduction prints of a similar size.

There used to be an obvious distinction between prints created by hand (original prints) and prints made by machine (reproduction) and some straightforward tests for informed buyers to classify the value and rarity of a printed artwork they were purchasing.  But our conclusion is that the advent of digital printmaking processes is making some of the previously useful rules of thumb for making the distinction between "artists prints" and "reproduction prints" less useful and possibly obselete.


Why doesn't NZ Fine Prints call reproductions of other artworks "reproductions" and reserve the term "print" for original artists' prints, produced digitally or otherwise?

This writer has previously been taken to task for New Zealand Fine Prints' policy of calling copies of artworks in other media (such as oil paintings or watercolours) "prints".  For instance Kerikeri printmaker Mark Graver took exception in both an article in the Artists Alliance Magazine #76 and in his book "Non Toxic Printmaking" (you can read a copy of his article here) when he was told by me in an email exchange that he was ‘fighting a losing battle’ in terms of trying to educate the public, and that ‘the terms art print and art reproduction, even poster are seen as pretty much interchangeable by the general public’.

Our response is that because the terms are used interchangeably it does not make sense from a business perspective to fight this battle.  Our artists and publishers rely on us to get sales and we operate in a competitive marketplace. Mercedes tried for years to promote "pre-owned cars" but nobody was looking for them, they now call them "used cars" like everyone else.

In our catalogues we have reproductions alongside screenprints or giclee prints next to limited edition reproductions of antique prints if they have a common theme or topic as we believe clear labelling, detailed descriptions and expert articles in NZ Art Print News will keep print buyers educated and informed.

"Cracker Biscuit"
Screenprinted reproduction of a
 painting by Michael Smither

[However as the series of prints by famous NZ artist Michael Smither we are cataloguing at the moment demonstrates classifying prints is still no easy task - Smither's range includes original prints AND handmade (screenprinted) prints that are based on original paintings].

As the shift to digital printmaking by fine art printmakers gathers pace it is more useful to ignore calls by printmakers like Graver for government regulation and to instead listen to his more sensible advice based not on regulating the process but on understanding the artist's intent. As Graver himself concedes "A Giclee… can be as much an original print as an etching or wood cut, it depends on the artist’s motive."