Susan Oehme

Susan Hover Oehme worked at Tyler Graphics Ltd in Mount Kisco for five and a half years from May 1991. She was an integral part of the intaglio team, and worked extensively on projects with Frank Stella and Joan Mitchell, among others. Oehme is now master printer at Oehme Graphics , her own successful fine print publishing house in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The recollections below are taken from a phone interview conducted by Emilie Owens in 2013.

Working at TGL

I started working at TGL through Tony [Anthony] Kirk . Tony was sort of my mentor back then and around the time that TGL started really doing a lot of big, big multiple prints for Frank Stella they decided to expand the etching team a little bit, and Tony said that I could get an interview. So I went in and talked to Ken. Right at that time I was actually working at Watanabe Studios for Jo Watanabe, printing a Sol Lewitt suite, so it was amazing timing. I literally finished the last edition of Sol Lewitt on Friday and started at Tyler the next Monday, so I didn’t have a break or anything. That’s how I got that job, through Tony.

I started one week apart from Yasu Shibata and we collaborated on four beautiful Masami Teraoka prints. The concept, the whole fundamental idea behind [those prints] from Masami was East meets West culture and we decided to augment that idea with the plate making. Instead of doing the classic black Sumi ink block, we did the black with an etching, which just opened up a whole new can of worms technically! We had to print the etchings onto this beautiful Japanese paper, but it had to be really wet, and then after I had done that and we would dry them, the blocks wouldn’t fit. Yasu did all the colour woodblocks and I did the etching. Poor Yasu had the worst part of that, just trying to make sure that all the colours fit into the proper spots.

Everybody got along pretty well, and I think overall most people were pretty good friends with each other. We did a lot of stuff at night, we would go out to see bands; there were a lot of good bands that played up there. We had this little tradition maybe once a month, or once every two weeks in the summer. We would hang out at the shop, after 5.30pm when we closed on Friday, and we would just play baseball. We had this sort of great big field down one end of the parking lot – it wasn’t big enough for a whole field, but we didn’t have enough people for two teams – so it was more like this kind of funny little combination of softball, baseball and cricket or something. It was fun, we did that a lot and it was great.

I was on the etching team, so we were all very close, but there were a lot of times where it could have been a sitcom or a reality TV show or something! Everybody had their own little personalities and things. We all knew that we were doing something really, really special and important – and I was always just so amazed that I got to be there. It was such a wonderful thing.

Memories of Joan Mitchell

Joan was tough, but she was a genius. And for some reason she liked me. I don’t know what else to say. I came in and, well, the joke was that I was her slave for a while! But she was great, she – and Helen Frankenthaler – I have never seen anyone have more of a sense of colour memory, and a sense of how colours work together. Both of them; it was just phenomenal.

I was so lucky to see Joan’s beautiful prints being printed. I remember two little tiny triptychs Little weeds. The yellow on those had to be absolutely perfect, no specks of any other colours in it, or dust, so after trying a number of times to achieve that – (and you’re in this big studio with all these other people around and there is always dust) – even as clean as it was you can’t help but have some specks getting in. So I ended up basically creating my own little clean corner of the one room, the main room, to use when I was editioning any prints for Joan with yellow in them (because I also did the larger ones). I went out and bought a baker’s apron that was sort of white and denim, and I had all the counter-tops in this one spot totally covered with white paper and basically I would dust the whole place off before I started printing or inking the plates. It was my own little Joan Mitchell world.

Near the end of her life all of us were just working so hard to print her stuff. I think she knew she was dying, and Ken knew she was dying, and we knew she was dying. It was such a weird situation. It was very sad, and yet she was very pragmatic about it. I don’t think she wasn’t being emotional or anything like that – that I could see – she was just…she just knew. I actually had a similar experience with Stanley Boxer when I was running River House Editions. He had gone through some chemo, but I have never seen anybody that had such an urge to create. He was sick in bed with altitude sickness – because where we were is very high in the mountains – combined with the intensive chemo it made him very ill. So he was in bed and he would work on plates on his pillow. He rebounded after that, at least for a couple of years before he got really sick again.

On projects with Frank Stella

Three and a half to four years of my time at TGL was with Frank Stella . And a lot of that time, for whatever reason, I ended up being the person who spent a lot of time in the wood shop, cutting. I cut hundreds of those little individual plates that fit into every single print on a scroll saw, and then of course bevelled all of them with these tiny little files. I spent hours and hours in the wood shop and I was also the primary colour mixer for all of the Stella stuff. I made this whole chart, and organised all the colours – all the drawdowns with all the recipes on them – and it ended up hanging way up high in this dead space underneath one of the sky lights. We had those 400 plus colours for Stella up there: it was the only way I could keep track of it because once I got over 100 colour samples it wasn’t working for me – having them in a shoe box or something – so we ended up making those big charts. It was really beautiful to see them and you could just read it from down in the studio and figure out what you had to do to mix the colour.

Frank is a genius, and one day he wanted to do some huge etching with just all these different variations of black. And Ken mixed up the blacks; well I’ve never seen anybody mix up so much ink in such a short time. He literally must have mixed up 20 or 30 cans of colour. They were piled – there were 12 or 15 piles of black – different blacks all the way around this huge table: just these giant piles of ink. There was black with orange mixed into it, or black with ultramarine blue mixed into it, or something like that. And they were really, really beautiful, these colours were gorgeous. Frank just wanted to do this little experiment. He would then end up with all these kind of experimental pieces going into his own personal, giant, flat file that he would pull from and make collages with. Nothing ever really went to waste: the pieces might just be sitting in the draw, but everything was saved and eventually at some point a lot of it was put into something new.