Some of you might be familiar to the name and the process of a Giclée, but maybe not its origin.
For one, the name Giclée itself is an invented name. It is believed to have derived from the French word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle" or more specifically, "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt or spray." This process was developed by Jack Duganne. He was a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print usd as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. the name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s, but since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print as is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.
The earliest prints to be called "Giclée" were created using the Iris Graphics models 3024, 3047, 4012 or "Realist" color drum continuous Hertz inkjet printers. Iris printers were originally developed to produce pre-press proof from digital files for jobs where color matching was critical such as product container and magazine publication. Their output wa used to check hat the colorw would look like before mas production began. Much experimentation took place to try to adpt the Iris printer to the production of color faithful, aesthetically plesing reproduction of artwork. Early Iris printers were relatively fugitive and tended to show color degradation after only few year. The use of new inkjets and printing substrates have extended to longevity and light fastness of Iris prints to last for 50 to 100 years.
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DEATH OF A PRINTMAKER! It has been said the giclee process has killed the traditional forms of printmaking. Back in the early 90's, I once read a mock obiturary written by an artist who was a printmaker and thought it was a little dramatic and that this printing with a computer would never catch on; boy was I wrong. Serigraph, Intaglio, Lithograph, Monotype, Aquatint, are all terms lost to the text books of art history. Printmaking has always walked the line between fine art and graphic art, but now with the digital revolution that line is gone. It seems anyone can be a printmaker; for the right price of a capture system, state of the art computer/photoshop software, and 60" wide computer printer; printmaking has become "user friendly". No more screens to burn, regristration marks to line up, acid plates to etch, lino cut nicks on the back side of your hand...Now its just click, drag and print; what used to take months of work is now just a few keystrokes away. Of course giclee printing has many perks, I'll save those for antoher days post. For now, I like to stand up for the traditionalists. I'm not ready to trade in my etched plates, wood blocks, or burned silkscreens for a bigger processor or expensive Waycom moniter with the fancy pen to draw on the screen. Now I like to revel in the art school days of old, with the smells and messes and smudged aprons, where a slip of the wood cut tool means your whole block is ruined; there's no "undo" key or "layer" to remove and save the file to fall back on; days, maybe months of work could be lost. Those are things the fine arts are made of; where talent and skill are more appreciated and valued than the latest and greatest brushstroke program. In this already fast paced technologically linked hypenated world, we are so quick to shortcut text msgs and acronym long company names. I'm sure it's important to a graphic artist but my Bachelor of Fine Arts can't tell the difference between a CYMK, RGB, jpeg, bmp, gif, tif, etc file from the tag on my car. I just never thought I would be so nostaglic or be one to say, "back in my day...", but as times change I must change with them. We need to keep up with the Jonses, if that means next week the 70" 3500 dpi printer then so be it. But for now, I, like creaking sound of the press bed, have to slow down and just remember when...
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