‘You Build Things Up Very Slowly’: Watch How Artist Kiki Smith Puts Her Own Unique Twist on Printmaking

The artist Kiki
Smith likes to be comfortable, especially when she’s working on
her extremely detailed prints, drawings, and tapestries—works that
take time and patience to make.

“I really like that you just work really slowly,” she says of
her printmaking process in particular, in an exclusive interview
for Art21’s Extended Play series. “You build things up very
slowly… I have to make about a million proofs of everything,”
she says of her attempts to capture the nuances of human flesh
using crosshatching and other techniques.

In the video, Smith is at the Harlan & Weaver printmaking
workshop, laboring over Two (2002), a double
portrait of her friend, Russian artist Dmitry Gaev, shown in
profile.

“This is sort of my first real attempt at trying to make a
person,” she says in the video, filmed in 2002. “It’s like a
mystery, and you’re trying to figure out how to rein it in. I find
printmaking—and also looking at prints—endlessly fascinating.”

That print is included in a current exhibition, “Kiki Smith: I
Am a Wanderer,” at Modern Art Oxford, the first UK solo show for
the artist in 20 years, alongside dozens of other examples of her
varied work, including large-scale tapestries and sculptures.

This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration
between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking
artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art
in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all
episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play
and learn about the organization’s educational programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘You Build Things Up Very Slowly’: Watch How Artist
Kiki Smith Puts Her Own Unique Twist on Printmaking appeared
first on artnet News.