Peter’s Press

Of all the physical relationships I’ve had in my life, among the most intimate is the one I have with my Golding Jobber № 8 letterpress. When I’m running the press, we are dancing, my rhythm matching its rhythm, making something beautiful together. On a good day, when we’re working well together, there is no better feeling.

The Jobber is, if not exactly inanimate, at least very predictable, always turning at the same speed, meeting me in the same spaces. If there is a dance partner that needs to bob and weave, it’s me, only me.

Of course I have a much deeper—and human—relationship with Lisa. 

While “on a good day, when we’re working well together, there is no better feeling,” can also be said of us, our shared humanity means that we’re both bobbing, both weaving, listening, responding, feeling, sensing, all the time. It’s a dance that’s alive, and wild, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

There’s something poignant, in light of all this, that my birthday gift from Lisa was this stunning relief print of the selfsame Golding Jobber:

To produce the print meant that Lisa had to become intimate with the geography of the press; not a dance, like mine, but a portrait-sitting that lasted for days.

The final print itself doesn’t do justice to the painstaking work that went into creating it: carving into a linoleum block, printing, carving more, printing, over multiple layers.

It’s only now, a month after I received the gift, after the enormity of the love, and sheer effort, behind the gift has sunk in, that I can sink into feeling the details of the print, and truly feel that it is, indeed, an intimate portrait of my longtime dance partner.

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There is something that happens sometimes in the print shop after the job is done, but the shop not yet cleaned up: you can end up with surplus creativity hanging in the air.

Lisa and I both know the feeling; it’s when some of the most lively things can happen.

One such instance, for me, came in 2014, when the printing of pieces for Brenda Whiteway’s Confederation Country Cabinet was completed. I had the words of Island poet Frank Ledwell still ringing in my ears, having just set and printed his poem Charlottetown Conference. 

I spent an extra hour in the shop and printed a broadside of a single line:

The piece remains among my favourites, in part because, rather than being the result of a careful and deliberate plan, it was conceived and born in the blink of an eye, in the “done” time.

Lisa’s Peter’s Press piece afforded her a similar gift, an edition-following-the-edition, she’s titled &Colour.

The notion arose from a desire to see the original rendered in different colours (the original having been printed in combinations of white, silver, blue, and black).

She started with four: Hot Pink, Lime Green, Turquoise, and Pyrrolle Orange.

After some additional carving, she overprinted a different set of four colours—Prussian Blue, Hansa Yellow, Crimson Red, and Quinacridone Magenta—to produce 16 unique combinations:

The effect is striking, and the piece becomes something else again, as a collection of 16, each member of which plays off the other.

A month ago we gave our friend Jessica Fritz a tour of the print shop while we were producing the colourful edition of the prints (her handiwork is infused into the Turquoise layer); from that experience came an offer to exhibit the entire edition on the walls of the Black & White in St. Peters Bay, the café she co-owns. 

Which is how Lisa and I found ourselves, yesterday, hammer and nails and measuring tape in hand, carefully hanging 16 framed prints on a large wall at the back of the café.

Seen mounted together as a framed edition, the prints truly are “something else again,” rooted in Lisa’s original design, but, with the colourful combinations, also a study in colour. 

I love it.

It’s a special bonus round for what was already as heartfelt a birthday gift as I can imagine receiving.

(It also happens to be the first public exhibition of Lisa’s work as a printmaker!)

You can see &Colour—and the original print—at the Black & White Café and Bistro, 5549 St. Peters Road, St. Peters Bay, from now through summer.