Thirteen

AFTER LUNCH, we went back to work. Gerhard seated us on opposite sides of a proofing table with direct, color balanced light. On the table he put a stack of my first Bacchanalia prints. I grinned as I remembered Melody, Bree, and Justin posing in and around a bathtub with Melody’s water jug pouring over Justin’s head and a glass of wine tipping off Bree’s tray. It had been fun staging that one when the three came into the studio. Kate had a stack of her prints in front of her.

We worked on examining the prints all afternoon. He watched over our shoulders. Once he pointed at something on the piece I was looking at. It was almost too small for me to notice. I needed to focus. I could almost hear Lissa in my head.

“Hickey,” Gerhardt said. “Between the blue and red layers.”

Part of our education had been learning how Gerhardt made seven color separations by photographing the artwork with different filters. That was what Erika was doing with one of my paintings while we worked at checking the prints. Normal offset color printing, usually called “process color,” uses four separations and four inks—cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Gerhardt’s art process pulled three additional separations for printing with a green, a hot pink, and a darker blue. The filters were adjusted so the colors were less saturated than in process color. Otherwise the inks would just get muddy and ugly. The prints we were examining—even with the original oil painting sitting in front of me as a reference—were stunning and vibrant. I was sure we’d never get this kind of result from an inkjet printer or giclée process.

By six o’clock, my eyes were crossing. Kate and I had each managed to spot a dozen problem prints which were eliminated from the batch of keepers. I thought it was a little funny that after we had each spotted the problems, there were exactly eighty-one prints left. What had Clarice told me? One printer’s proof, five artist’s proofs, and seventy-five signed and numbered. I suspected that Gerhardt had already checked these prints and left a few for us to find errors on. I just hoped we’d speed up the process a little as we learned what to look for.

“Opa, dinner,” complained Erika. I was glad she was doing the whining so I wouldn’t have to. I was tired and hungry.

“Ja, ja. What?”

“Catfish!”

“Ach. Ja okay.”

Kate and I didn’t even comprehend the English they spoke. Gerhardt closed up the shop and we went out to Erika’s VW minibus. The thing was ancient and painted up like you wouldn’t believe.

“We can call our driver,” I said, looking at the rickety vehicle.

“No, no,” Erika said cheerfully. “Just pile in. You’ll love this place. You got to experience grits this morning. Tonight, you get hushpuppies and catfish. We’ll make Georgians of y’all in no time.”

I squeezed Kate’s hand as we struggled to hook seatbelts into the right connections. Gerhardt was quiet as we headed for dinner, but Erika was on her own turf now and jabbered away, pointing out local sites, talking about how Bibb City got its name, and showing us where we’d turn to get back to the Doubletree. Then we pulled into the parking lot of a shack with a big sign out front that said “Ezell’s.”

We do have catfish in Nebraska, but no one fixes them deep fried and spiced the way Ezell’s does. Add to that the crisp, hot hushpuppies with bits of corn and jalapenos, a side of coleslaw, and I think we ate for two hours. They just kept bringing the fish and the hushpuppies. If you think having fish for dinner is a healthy alternative, you haven’t eaten at Ezell’s. I was surprised the salad wasn’t deep fried. But the flavor was better than anything I’ve ever had—at least anything that came out of the water. Kate was packing it away, too.

Tuesday was more of the same, only more intense as we got down to more work and fewer lessons. Erika was our room service again and hung around a few minutes while we sat to eat. Having heard us talking about coffee, she’d brought Kate a latte and me an Americano with our breakfast. I gave her a ten for a tip again and she hesitated.

“If y’all hadn’t tipped me that yesterday before I knew you, I wouldn’t take this today. But since now I know that’s the way y’are, I’ll just shove it in my pocket and not tell anybody. See y’all later.”

It was a long day. After I went through my first print, I had eighty-seven copies left that I thought were good. I went back through them a second time and couldn’t find an error anyplace. I was sure there must be one somewhere that I hadn’t found. I finally called Gerhardt over and confessed that I couldn’t find the error.

“Gut,” he said. “We have a few extra good ones of this print. After they are signed, you can decide to destroy the extras or release them without a signature. Here. This is the next one.”

Kate and I each managed to get through three prints, including a break to watch how Gerhardt inked the press and pulled the yellow plate of my new print. He said it was the last one, save the two extras I’d sent down. When the paper came off the press with just yellow ink on it, it didn’t look like much. Yellow is so hard to see against the paper. Gerhardt ran 200 copies once he was satisfied that the color density was right. After he cleaned up the press and set up the cyan plate, he inspected all the yellow pages and threw out six of the 200. He just pulled them and dumped them in a recycle bin.

We’d been in Doc’s printmaking class all semester and one of the things I’d learned was how expensive art paper for prints was. Then I tallied up the fact that Gerhardt was starting with 200 of the first color and I hadn’t seen a run yet that ended up with more than ninety in the stack. Half the pages were being trashed. I was thankful for whoever it was that was sponsoring our work here and figured that giving him or her number one of seventy-five was a small payment.

When the cyan was laid in, we could see a difference in the print. Not only were we seeing yellow and light greenish-blue, but some spots of green were showing as well. With the magenta plate, we could see the picture and tell what was where, though my fingers wanted to reach in with paint and touch up a few spots, add highlights and shadows, and maybe mix some richer colors. It was desaturated. That’s when he started pulling the deeper colors he used in the process. First the green, then the blue, and finally the hot pink. With each successive color, the artwork became more vibrant and filled with intensity. By the time there were six colors on the paper, it looked like the painting.

“Now the miracle of black,” Gerhardt said. I know I didn’t use any black paint when I painted this image. It was the three teens, peeking around a drapery. I’m sure I mixed some black paint into a color to tone it down, but never any straight black. Still I watched as Gerhardt inked the press and the first sheet came off with the black added. The colors just popped off the page. It was brilliant. The shadows were deeper without going muddy and by contrast, the colors and highlights seemed brighter. Gerhardt looked at the first copy, shrugged, and said, “Too bad.” He tossed it in the recycle bin and made adjustments on the press. I’m not sure yet what he saw, but he sent us back to our work.