Printmaker Michael Woolworth and artist Richard Gorman have come up with a cross between a book and a set of prints to honour the work of Samuel Beckett, writes Aidan Dunne.
Michael Woolworth, of the Atelier Michael Woolworth in Paris, is a tall, laconic, good-humoured man in his late 40s. His dark hair, worn relatively long, is combed back from a receding hairline. You could say that he is an archetypal American in Paris. He arrived in the city when he was about 19 years old and, as he puts it: "I sort of never went home." Instead, he says, gesturing around him at the crowded space of his print workshop: "I stumbled into this." In many respects he represents the kind of Paris that one worries might have disappeared: the bohemian Paris of painters and writers and musicians, a republic of the arts.
Woolworth hadn't studied print-making when he took a job in a workshop, so his education was essentially an old-fashioned apprenticeship. One thing led to another and he developed personal reasons for staying in Paris. Eventually, in 1985, he felt confident enough to set up his own workshop. He has worked with dozens of artists since, including Sean Scully and Jim Dine. His current atelier, his seventh address since 1985, is centrally located, tucked away just off the Place de la Bastille. It is a ground-floor, single-storey space that has been amended and added to over the decades so that it now has a sprawling, labyrinthine quality - ideal for a print workshop, as it happens.
Pretty much every usable bit of space is occupied by presses, cabinets, packages of paper, inks, rags, squeegees and masses of other paraphernalia. Bookcases groan under the weight of monographs and catalogues, and there is music on the stereo all the time - Paolo Conte, Chet Baker, Miles Davis. But the casual ambience is deceptive.
The printing process demands scrupulous standards of cleanliness. A hint of a thumbprint, a crease or the slightest misalignment can undo many hours of work. Something that's gone through the press six times can still be ruined by a mistake on the seventh, meaning everything is down the drain.
Last year Woolworth was enlisted by the Beckett Project Paris to work with painter Richard Gorman on an artist's book. The Beckett Project was established in 2005. As well as encouraging interest in Beckett's literary heritage, it aims to focus attention on his influence on other artistic disciplines, and to promote work in those disciplines that is related in some way to Beckett.
At first glance the choice of an abstract artist such as Gorman might seem odd. Mention art in relation to literature and people tend to think of illustration. The trajectory of Gorman's work has followed an arc away from illustration and towards abstraction. Earlier on, his paintings expressed an allusive, narrative content through a gestural vocabulary, but he has come to work with a much sparser vocabulary altogether, consisting of flat areas of colour in forms of geometric regularity, bounded by hard edges.
Easy-going by temperament, Gorman has long divided his time between Dublin and Milan, but he would look equally at home, you feel, in any cosmopolitan city. There is something urbane, even sybaritic about his appearance, but in fact he has structured his life around an almost ascetic dedication to his work. When the Beckett Project was first mooted, he says: "I looked at the idea of using quotations as references, and I wasn't really very comfortable with it." One can see why. But then, there is no reason why a work made in response to Beckett's writing should take the form of illustration or be tied to specific textural references.
Gorman and Woolworth got on well and gradually the original idea of the artist's book evolved into something slightly different, a cross between a book and a set of prints. In fact it is a boxed set of seven prints - hence the title Sept- with its own printed title page and introduction. The Beckett Project committee, including the organisation's president Sheila O'Leary, arts administrator Helen Carey and publisher John Calder, was agreeable. O'Leary says that Gorman was a natural choice for a couple of good reasons. "Beckett was an Irish writer who chose to adopt France and its language," while Gorman too has followed the Irish tradition of adopting a European base. More to the point, perhaps, she cites his reductionist aesthetic.
"The paintings I make," he has said, "signify only that they are what I spend my time doing." There is an obvious parallel between his desire to dispense with anything extraneous and Beckett's celebrated stylistic epiphany in the 1940s, when he realised that, in contrast to Joyce and Proust, his linguistic path would be one of impoverishment, subtraction and "lack of knowledge". His own critical writings on art suggest an eventual disenchantment with representation, "the field of the possible", and the Italian painters who "surveyed the world with the eyes of building contractors". He could not see the point of "doing a little better the same old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road". It seems fair to say that Beckett gave up writing about visual art because he felt that he was not adding to or elucidating the work of the artists but that, increasingly, what he was writing about painting really applied to his own work, which begins precisely at the point where there is nothing more to say: "nothing to express, nothing with which to express . . . no desire to express, together with the obligation to express". Gorman's work has an identical point of departure.
When Woolworth branched ou on his own he knew pretty much what he wanted. In running a print workshop, he explains, "to make something happen which is personal to you is difficult". But that is what he had in mind, and what was personal was the opposite of a logical process of expansion, of developing the workshop so that it operated on an industrial scale. "I knew that I wanted to use hand presses, to establish a slow rhythm of working with the artist, to do fewer projects." Once they'd figured out what they were doing, Gorman, Woolworth and Daniel Clarke, one of his small team of printmakers at the atelier, spent five solid weeks working on making proofs, a process of interaction and collaboration - or, as Woolworth puts it: "With Richard, you can never stop."
"We would sit around having intense discussions about what was happening with regard to colour and colour combinations," Gorman recalls. "On your own you can go seriously wrong with colour, you can go off on a tangent." In fact, he has a distinctive colour sense, one inclined towards a muted, classical palette, shot through with flashes of brightness that belong to a different tonal scale entirely. In both the new prints and the closely related paintings that make up his solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, he ups the ante with expanses of zinging hues: lemons and acid yellows, lime greens and salmon pinks. They dance against sombre greys and browns.
The format of both prints and paintings is square, and, as Woolworth puts it, the compositions play on the idea of "a notional square". The square is implicit but what we see fragments and stops short of a square in various ways; curvilinear shapes push against the boundaries, mobilising energies and tensions that threaten to pull the implied, stable form apart. The prints in Septmake up a tightly integrated set of variations on this theme, and they interact beautifully, so that the colour and shapes in one pick up on those in another. It may have been the sense of straining at the leash that suggested the title Flyer that recurs in the titles of the paintings.
"Daniel said that the shapes in the prints reminded him of kites," Gorman explains. Japanese takogami paper was chosen for the prints. "It would be nice to say that we chose it for a good reason, but in fact we didn't know until afterwards: takogami means kite paper."
• Sept , by Richard Gorman, made at the Atelier Michael Woolworth, is a limited, numbered and signed edition (40) of seven original prints plus one title page in a custom-made box. They are available from the Beckett Project Paris, C/O Centre Cultural Irlandais, 5 rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris, France.Richard Gorman: Recent Works is at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris until July 13.
