 these for the image. So yeah, welcome to Makers at the Hall and to this library. It's one of my very favorite rooms in Portland. The fresh paint I noticed, it used to be blue in here of all colors. Yes, you can tell that I just got painted in here. One thing I always like to let people know is that this is, I don't know if it's the only library in me, but there is a current card catalog. So if you need to just rouse a card catalog, come here and do it and there's actually the book on the shelf that matches up. A little bit about the Main Charitable Mechanics Association. I imagine some people know plenty about it. I see a few familiar faces here. This organization has been here a long time. It was founded in the main charitable mechanics. It was founded in 1815. This building is from 1857. The mechanic associations were a nationwide, a global phenomenon for a while. This is one of the last ones, I think a lot of the rest are in Australia of all places, that is still what it was to start with an organization of Makers for Makers. Many of them you'll notice have turned into concert halls, libraries, all sorts of other things, but this one is still here trying to do this thing to bring people together who make stuff and see what happens when we do that. This Makers at the Hall happens the last Wednesday of every month. It's a moment when we have a chance to we invite in some of the one-by-one the extraordinary Makers of Maine. It's a great opportunity for us to get together, to hear from, talk with that Makers, but also with each other, inspire each other, connect with each other, see what we might do together. If you are interested, if you're not a member already, membership is cheap. Just 25 bucks a year for an individual. That's part of its goal, too, is to bring us together on this organization. So without any further ado, I'm going to hand us over to the maker of the evening, Pilar Nadal. She's a master crib maker right here in Portland. Pickwick Independent Press, she is director of that fabulous establishment. I point like that because it's right across the street, literally, and if there's interest, oh, did I point in the wrong direction? I always go according to my own personal map. It's across the street, wherever the street is, and if there's interest at the end of the evening, Pilar would be happy to take folk across to see the wonders inside. If you haven't seen them already. The way the evening is going to play out, I'll hand it over. She'll say all the fabulous things she has to say, show all sorts of fabulous pictures. We'll have plenty of time to chit-chat with her afterwards, question and answer. We will then fold the screen, this one and cake behind there, and then a tour, if you like. All right. So, Pilar, excellent. Yeah, hello. Hi, everybody. I'm Pilar Nadal, and thank you very much for that fantastic introduction, and thanks very much for inviting me here. I love the space. I've been here a few times. So, yeah, so I am the director of Pickwick Independent Press, and Pickwick Independent Press is right across the street that way. Can we actually see it? Almost. No, we can't, but we're on the second floor, right above Space Gallery, and we started in 2009, September of 2009, so we're eight and a half years old. We started down the streets, what used to be Whitney Artworks, and then was Rose Contemporary in the in the back room of that, and then moved to the basement of Space Gallery as a small t-shirt printing operation. Then we moved up two floors, and then we've been slowly expanding over the last eight and a half years. So, it's been pretty exciting. I came in about seven years ago. The space was founded by a woman named Lisa Pixley, and she started it as the second community print shop in town. The primary print shop at the time was and still remains to be a print shop in town as Peregrine Press. At the time, the roster was full there, and her idea was to kind of create a space where emerging and novice printmakers could kind of land, and then other people who needed space could get into printmaking and land there. So, it was in an effort to kind of bolster that printmaking idea. And so, we now have, Pickwick now has almost four community print shops and countless Portland itself, countless individual studios and businesses based in printmaking. So, I find that Portland is a fantastic town. There's lots and lots of stuff going on here, and everybody making all sorts of different kinds of prints, commercial, artwork, everything. So, it's a really exciting place for a printmaker. So, let's see. I might want to look at my notes. So, I came in about seven years ago and started co-running the space with Lisa and doing workshops and events and things like that. And the two of us were running things pretty smoothly that way. And it was really exciting. I came for grad school. I went to grad school at Mecca and had always wanted a place to live with a fantastic community print shop. And so, decided to turn Pickwick or Portland into my hometown, which has been really a wonderful thing. So, that was seven years ago. And, where to go from there? I, as Megan mentioned, I studied with David Wolf under his master printer apprenticeship program right after I graduated from Mecca with my MFA. Then I went straight into work with him for two years. And I filled in a lot of the gaps that my prior education had left. And so, working with him for two years was a fantastic opportunity. And after such, he granted me master printmaker status. And that is when I also took over ownership and directorship of Pickwick. And so, that was about two and a half years ago. Lisa is now starting her own special private slash soon-to-be-public print shop, which is really exciting, in the west end of Portland. I don't know if I'm at liberty to talk about it, but... What do you mean by soon-to-be-public? Soon-to-be-public. So, they'll be a storefront. Okay. So, it's a space for people to go and... Yeah. So, it's her studio as well as she has a partner named Martha Kearsley. And the two of them have their private studios there, and then they'll have a public open space to buy prints. Can you describe what you do there? That is, you do offer classes for children and adults. I'm getting there. Do you ask for print for artists? You know, what goes on there? Yes. So, Pickwick is home to... Right now, we've got about 25 members. And I always call it a printmaker or a gym for printmakers. Everybody has a contract and they have 24-hour access to the space. So, they come and they can use any of our facilities for letterpress, screen printing, intaglio, offset lithography, relief printing, all of the things. We're close to the end of the round. And so, we'll come back around. You guys have probably seen a few of the interior shots. So, we have about five. We have three intaglio and relief presses and three letter presses and one offset dupe theater and countless other materials and tools and equipment that printmakers can use. And so, aside from membership, we also offer workshops. The workshops have a variety of forms, but primarily, we mostly do custom-based one-on-one workshops, which is a four-hour session where people can come in and learn a process top to bottom. And then, after one or two of those, depending on the technique, they can come and rent from the space either by the day or by the week or by the month where they can become members. We also do master editioning with artists. And that's usually a one-on-one relationship where we work with artists until they have a print that they want to produce in multiples, and then we take it from there and then produce the print. So, that can look like a lot of different things. It can look like a very small piece. It can look like a large addition. It's all sorts of different ways that can turn out. So, we've got workshops. We've got editioning. We've got commission work, just straight commission work. We get, because of our letterpress facilities and our screen printing facilities and the high skills that everybody has there, we get a lot of people who are looking for posters, invitations, business cards, all sorts of printing matter. We tend towards making a lot of different kinds of things and want to really stretch the bounds of our equipment. And so, we try to push the boundaries of what a commercial shop could do. Oh, that's our, yeah. We also offer events. So, one of the things about being a print shop in town is, and having 25 members, we have members who are just out of college, who have just graduated with a print degree or some other degree and then studied printmaking. We have people who have taken just a few workshops with us, and we have people who have a lifetime of experience and like the energy of our shop. And so, we like to offer our spot as kind of a platform for creative entrepreneurship and more than just a space to work, but a place to sell their work out of. And so, that can happen in a variety of ways. We have, this is Mel, who is DJing one of our pop-up shops. So, a few times a year, we have a pop-up shop in our print shop where we'll have demos, but we'll also have everybody's stuff for sale. So, right around the holidays, sometime in the summer, sometime in the spring, that sort of thing happens. Thank you. It's not changing, but it's just over. But it's staying awake, so that's good. But so, we've got that stuff. We also have really unique relationships with our neighbors. So, Space Gallery commissions us to do exhibition cards and they commission us to do one of our members to do a poster, special edition poster for their events once a month for the last two years. So, that's been an exciting project where they'll give us a list of things and the members will sign up for things and then they'll get paid for those pieces. And then it's a really nice collection of posters in the end of the year. But so, there's all sorts of different stuff that we do. And pretty much, this guy's the limit. And we operate very much as a community group, even though everybody's working individually on their own things. It's the energy of the shop is that we're all working together and it's kind of, you know, a place where you walk in and you can talk to people if you want. Most people do. You can keep it to yourself, but it's usually pretty a social atmosphere. How many people tend to be there at any time? It's a good question, depending on the time of year and depending on the time of day. So, daytime is usually anywhere from one to six people show up. Nighttime, I tend to go home around seven o'clock at night. So, I have no idea what happens in that shop in the middle of the night, but I know that things happen and they're all good things. But yeah, so there's people there all hours of the night. And most of our members do have multiple jobs. And so, this is just one of their many things that they want to do. And so, it's nice to have that 24-hour access so they can really take advantage of that space. We also work with artists who come in for residencies, usually from, well, we have a lot of different... In the last year, we've had somebody from Greece come in a few times, somebody from a few people from New York, a couple of people from Brazil. So, people come to our shop to kind of take advantage of the wider range of equipment and also the more affordable pricing that we have. And they can work 24 hours a day kind of doing a DIY residency of sorts and doing any sort of kind of experimental stuff. So, that's a really nice energy that happens or that brings to the shop. Space also offers a residency, artist and residency every year and a... It's just not working. And gives one of those residencies a fellowship in the shop. So, that's been a really exciting thing to have happen. That's where somebody is working right down the street or right down the hallway and then they can come in from their studio and work in the print shop. So, all sorts of different stuff happens. What's your relationship with Mecca? That's a great question. So, I have a lot of interns. I also have an internship program. Most of my interns come from Mecca. We also have... I can fix it if you want. We also have a fellowship program where we give Mecca and I give a graduating senior a year-long membership at Pickwick in exchange for a production project for the school. So, we've done graduation invitations. We've done screen printing on Moleskins for new students who are being admitted. We've done all sorts of different fun projects for them. So, that's a really nice program that really allows students to get their feet wet and maybe a freelance career that they probably will start at some point or maybe commercial work that they want to do or at least some sort of intensive project that they can put all of their newfound skills to. But we have a very friendly relationship which is great as an alumni and also a... a... a... a tenorant adjunct. I can... it's a good relationship, but... What about your presses? You mentioned them when you had... How does one go about when you had to get this? Did you buy new equipment when you took over the Leuchte? So we have a few different presses. We have, this is a medium-sized press, well I call it a medium-sized press, it's actually a large press, because it's in the scheme of things. We have a baby press and a medium press and then we have a four by eight press that we built in the shop. So one thing that we do is we'll, what, presses get donated to us, not regularly, but more than I thought they would, we'll get a lot of calls asking if we can haul something out of somebody's basement. And then if we can use it, we'll try to soup it up and see what happens. So you'll upgrade and get whatever press you replace it. Exactly, yeah. We had one press that was kind of Frankenstein from a small press that we turned into this four by eight press where we had, you saw some pictures of a event down on the street. So Lisa built this as a kind of a press that would mimic the idea of a steamroller printing event because there was one of our events in 2006 where space had a block party and they shut down the street and that was one of our many events out in the world where everybody carved four by four blocks and then we rented a steamroller and then we printed those. So there was some pictures of there in there but it was so exciting that Lisa wanted to do that full time. So she built this press, which is quite great. And she actually built it in order for it to be taken apart and then taken down to the street. So it's all, it's made out of wood except for the cylinders. And it can print a four by six block on a four by eight piece of paper, which is pretty, it's a large undertaking to do that. Yes. Now are you doing offering wood block and linoleum also? Yes. If you do that too, yeah. So we do all sorts of different classes. So wood block, linoleum, letter press, screen printing, all sorts of things. And when you have artists come that want their work reproduced, are you finding, is that mostly silk screen or? No, it really varies. It depends. We did an addition that was all monotype, which was exciting. And that was a really exciting relationship because that was working one on one with somebody who didn't have a lot of experience in printmaking but knew what they wanted it to look like. So they would be on one side making plates and we would be putting it through the press and seeing what would happen. And it was kind of this large format studio for this person. So all sorts of things like that, yeah. And I realize as you're talking, there are a lot of process names going around, which is just awesome. So we have monotype and silk screening. I've heard in Talio you mentioned briefly. You mentioned t-shirts, which I may or may not still go on. And then you have all these different presses with all of these different capabilities. So I wonder if I might say just a bit about what that range means for you and is that normal? Do you have such a range of possibilities? I think it's unique. Yeah, it's the kind of thing where a good portion of print shops will have a variety of equipment but they might specialize in one to three techniques. We, yeah, we have, you know, there's four blanket techniques of print making and we can do some variety of all four of those, which is exciting. And we also, I always, so we have, there's Peregrine Press, which is the 26 years old, I believe, Peregrine Press has been around. And then there's Running With Scissors is the newest press and they've been around for three years now. And so we've been around for eight and a half years. So I like to call us the rowdy teenagers of the print making scene. So we like to come and really, you know, push the boundaries as to what's possible. And so we'll often, if we get donated equipment, we can also, we see as far as we can, we can see what we do with it. So we got, we, a donated offset duplicator to us years and years ago and we hacked it to be a relief press. So we've switched all the mechanics on it and so made these plates that could fit around the drums in order to do that. Offset and relief. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So I'll start to, what's the difference that, cause I don't know if everybody already knows those words. Yeah. So, okay, there's, yeah, yeah. So relief, relief primarily is when you're inking up the surface of a block and you're taking the ink off of that surface. So you're carving away anything that you don't want to print. And so you're printing what's on the surface of that block. Lithography works on a grease versus water principle where the ink will attach to it. It's a planar process where the plate is all one surface, one plane of surface and grease sticks on one part of it and the ink will stick to that part. And so the offset lithography usually is where that will, that ink will offset onto a blanket and that blanket prints onto the paper. So it's a two-part process. So it's kind of a, it's a right reading process, which is also exciting. So you don't have to think backwards so much. But also you can, you can do a variety of multiples with it. Does that make sense? All right. Yeah. I've been enjoying the pictures of the various presses. Yes. And I saw the offset press. Yes. And then since the others that you've been making. Yes. But I'm impressed that you do letter presses. Where do you find the block handset type? Yes. Anymore. You'd be surprised that the, the basements that I, that I've reckoned or I mentioned earlier has been more often than not I have somebody, a student or a friend or somebody who will say, oh, my grandfather has a whole lot of stuff in his basement. And do you want any of it? That kind of thing. So that's a really exciting thing. There's also, their letterpress has been enjoying a resurgence for the last 15 years. And so that has been really exciting. So there's a lot more sources for that sort of thing. In this town, there's many people who do letterpress printing and so we often, I call our shop the little shop of hand-me-downs. We kind of get the stuff that everybody's sick of. So we'll do a lot of trading of type and of things like that. We also have a photopolymer plate exposure unit. And so we can create photopolymer plates, which will, it's basically our kind of technological advancement for letterpress printing. So we can create a digital design and then create a plate for that. And then put, put that on a base on one of our, our presses and then print, print it that way. Any historic type for various places I would like to say, organic papers melted down most of their lead sites. Yes. I know. But some presses do. Yes. Do you have any from historic areas? I have, I have, yes, I have a variety. I'm not sure the exact sources of a lot of the stuff that I have because it does get just kind of shoved over to us in a cardboard box that we then sort out. But there are a variety of things that come from, like I have a box that I found at Liberty Tool of a dairy farm newspaper, cut all these cuts from a dairy farm, dairy farmers newspaper. Yeah, so it's, it's things like that happen. It's very random. And that makes me wonder, like thinking of the odd things that come into your shop, the equipment that gets handed down. And then you say how you guys really like to push the boundaries as much as possible. Yeah. So how do you push the boundaries in printmaking, like what kinds of things are you looking to try to do when you say that? Yeah, so things like hacking the offset duplicator to print relief plates is one of those things. Using, I mean, one thing is just using type, and we like to call it preservation through production, where we're not keeping things behind glass. There's the trusty offset duplicator. That's a good guy. But yeah, you can see that we've had to update it with things like that. ABDIC is the brand of it. It is, it is post-memiograph pre-Zerox. Yeah, no, no, no, not at all. Yeah, so it is, it's kind of, I call it the jalopy of the shop. It's like we get it fired up and it's like kind of jumping around and prints go flying and yeah, it's pretty exciting. So you just put that in historical context. So she said mimeograph and you said post-memiograph pre-Zerox. Yes, exactly. And you guys also had the find-not-wrong or reset graph? Yes, we do. So you guys are all like keeping everything in action but there's a history of printing going on. So what makes this not mimeograph, not Zerox and what's the mizographs do? Because that's also a duplicate. Yeah, so, okay, so how do I explain it all? So the Rizograph, has anybody heard of a Rizograph? This side's maybe. So Rizograph is a company, it's a Japanese company that created, it's like the silk screen process kind of smashed with the Zerox machine. Is it Goko? It's like, it's an automated Goko. Yeah, so there's, it operates some liquid soy-based ink and what it looks like a Zerox machine and copy machine, I guess I should say. And you feed a master in and you do one color at a time and it duplicates and so I don't like to talk about it a lot cause they're very grumpy and they're grumpier than any other machine I've ever dealt with but it produces, it's a very charming mis-registered look, is what it produces. And you print one color at a time so you can print 300 of something but you then, to change colors you create a different master for that different color and you put the rim of paper in and then you cross your fingers and hope that it registers correctly, which it doesn't. But yeah, so it's the kind of thing too where you also need these big expensive drums for each color and they have to stay that color. So we have, we have seven drums with our Resograph which is an exciting thing but different colors act differently and so it's like any printmaking process. It's what, we don't like to call them difficulties, we call them normals. So yeah, it's always figuring out that kind of troubleshooting. And I don't have, I don't have a picture of the Resograph because it's like the least sexy machine that I've got. This is one of, this is Irini from, she came from Greece, she has a, she lives, her mother lives in town but she's a great printmaker and she's, she doesn't have a print shop in Greece where she lives so she comes here to immerse herself in a certain process and then creates her work for her shows for the rest of the year, which is exciting. And what process is she using right now? This is screen printing. This is screen printing, yes. Yes. Was there a second part of your question that I didn't answer? Well, because I'm just starting to get really interested in, so you were saying that there's a resurgence right now in letter printing and there's this really robust printing culture here in Portland. Yes. And so you were telling, so you've got all these different processes and are really, I love the way that it sounds like in your shop there's this really old school stuff that you don't need electricity plus but you can also make polymer plates in your space. And so I'm interested where you wear this letter press and print making like this fit in the world of media because it seems like you guys do some of the public facing stuff but not only. Yeah. So where is print making right now? She said. How much chat, yeah, how much are we on? Where is print making right now? I mean, I think that's what we're all trying to figure out in that sense that, I mean what I've noticed is not only a print maker but also a teacher is, and in our world of saturation and social media and all sorts of digital toys that we can play with is that where we love the tactile stuff then we miss it a lot and then we're not being raised to really understand tactility in a way that we used to be. And so I think people are really drawn to print making for that reason and people are drawn to letter press for that reason. There's letter press printing began as a relief process where you're kissing the paper to the type and it's just kissing the paper and so there's no impression at all. Now people really like letter press because it can punch into a paper and you can feel that bite of the impression. And so that is just this yearning that people have and that luckily we've been able to adapt our equipment and our papers and our materials in order to create that kind of tactility, which is exciting. So I think process, the multi-step process is really a draw to print making when I think about my own work. There's this sometimes three steps, sometimes 27 step process for that you have to go through to make a piece and there's always a little bit of a delay in between that I have to make a decision in. So it's an investment of time and attention and I think also about the community that surrounds print making. I mean, community print shops are part of a good majority of cities and towns because no one person, well, some people can but most people cannot afford to have all of this equipment all by themselves and nor the space or all of this stuff. So by sharing the burden of those costs and that investment, we can all use all of this equipment. So there's not only that expense and affordability but also that we're all troubleshooting, we're all doing these processes together and we're all figuring it out and so there's a social aspect to print making that I think is really imperative. Yeah. Oh, was there a question on the floor? One other thing, is I noticed printers without borders? Yes, printers without margins. Yes. I mean without margins. Yeah. What is that? Yeah, that's a great question. So look, there's a dog screen printing. I know, it's a good one. Yeah. So printers without margins is our latest project that was born about a year ago-ish and it is as a community shop, individuals found themselves making printed matter in service of social justice causes as just as a part of the political climate over the last year. So as a shop, we decided to get together and offer this idea to our community and offer these ideas of we are people who can print things and we can print things kind of fast, kind of cheaply and there are a lot of people who need things. They need, maybe they need signs, maybe they need brochures, maybe they need flyers, t-shirts, all sorts of things. So we have two parts of the program now where people can approach us and we've been fundraising for this project and so we can do work either pro bono or at a very low cost for people who need projects or printed matter in service of social justice work, which has been a really exciting and really gratifying and rewarding and propelling project that keeps opening up itself up into more things. And the second part of it is that we've just been given a grant to create a residency program of sorts for it for 2018. So we're just actually tomorrow going to launch our application for it online where people can who wouldn't otherwise have a chance to join a shop or somebody who might want to use the equipment to make their own printed matter. We're giving six people month long memberships, workshops and collaborative partners all free and paid for as a part of this grant. So that's been really exciting, yeah. And I love the way that's a sponsor. Signage is just, it's better if it's on paper, you know? It's horrible. It's light, it's easy to carry, it says the thing. Exactly, so that's awesome. Yeah, so that's been really fun. Who's the grant from? From the Kindling Fund, which is, space is the re-granting agency. It's from the Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts. So they give space a certain amount of money and then space administers it. It's been an exciting thing for space to also, it's the third year in a row that it's been happening and maybe it's fourth, no, third. And so where the Warhol Foundation gives money to cities all around the country for similar projects. But we're the only statewide fund that they support. So it's an exciting thing because there are projects all over the state that have been funded for it.