Squeak Carnwath was one of the first artists to work with Paulson Bott Press, and we went on to make several editions together over the years. Recently, I visited her at her studio in Oakland to talk about her recent work and some of the prints we collaborated on at the press.

RB: I was reading John Yau’s article about you in Hyperallergic , and he called your approach to art-making diaristic. To me, your work is more of a stream of consciousness.

SC: Same difference as far as I’m concerned.
RB: Do you feel like your paintings are autobiographical?

Renee Bott, Squeak Carnwath and Poppy, Emeryville Studio, 1997

SC: Sure. I think everybody’s are. Some are more willing to share. Those are the paintings I like better. The best ones, in my mind, are the ones that don’t have all the answers but have some hidden mysteries that get discovered over time. When viewers look at a painting one day, they can come back the next day and it’s not the same painting.

RB: When did you decide that you were an artist?

SC: I didn’t know what one was. But I knew that I wanted to keep doing what I was doing, which was painting things, making things. Then I saw a painting by Joan Miro. I thought, great, there’s a woman who does this. It turned out Miro was a guy—so upsetting. But I got a lot of encouragement making art, so I just kept doing it. I started painting with oils when I was in the fifth grade. I just wanted to keep doing that. I didn’t know you could do this. And actually, you couldn’t. Most people don’t make any money from this at all. You have to have another job. Or, typically, a lot of the men had family help, a wife who worked and paid everything. Or they were independently wealthy. I was never that. Motherwell was probably in good shape, Frankenthaler. They didn’t ever have a job.

RB: They came from a certain class.

SC: They did. I figured out later on that you could teach, that would be a good thing to make money. That was how I got into teaching.

RB: You say all paintings are autobiographical. But I think yours are different.

SC: I want them to be revealing. I am interested in being a little uncomfortable, maybe a lot uncomfortable, being worried that I’ve done something really godawful. I like that challenge. Also, I feel like it’s my job to share the uncomfortable stuff, in terms of the painting. My own persona and life, no thank you—you have to get to know me if I’m going to do that. But I’m okay if it’s all in the painting.

Squeak Carnwath: KITCHEN SINK, 1999 Color Aquatint with hard and soft ground etching, 37 x 36” Edition of 30

RB: We made a print together called Kitchen Sink. One of the things that you wrote in the background is, “I promise to be good. I promise to be good.” I felt like that really was a universal childhood experience for our generation.

SC: Maybe for everybody in some way.

RB: I’m looking around your studio, and I see these notes tacked up on the wall next to each Painting.

SC: That’s how I keep track of what I want to do. They’re kind of a diary of the paintings, or the diary of studio practice. I have hundreds of them. It’s how I draw, basically. Even though I do some works on paper, I don’t consider those drawings for some reason. I consider these, the crazy papers, more of a drawing. My dream is to sell them all as an archival set. The person who buys them gets the rest of the ones I produce in my lifetime...if they buy them before I die.

Squeak Carnwath in the Paulson Bott Press studio, 2011 Photography by Renee Bott

RB: The most recent show you had at the Jane Lombard Gallery was titled Pattern Language. Is that a title you came up with?

SC: Yes. Pattern Language was the title of a book by the architect Chris Alexander. He used to teach at Berkeley. His whole idea was that there are reoccurring aspects to building a human environment. Like, you should have nooks. You should have a certain amount of windows, a certain kind of stair in a certain place, a certain texture, all this stuff that makes places charming, human-centric, more haptic. So they were trying to get me to think of a title. Why do we have to do that anymore? Why do we have to even do statements? I don’t do those. [laughter] I have one statement. It’s 13 points that I think a painting has. So I either send that or a fragment from it.

Squeak Carnwath: HOME, 2020 oil and alkyd on canvas over panel
50 x 50 inches

RB: The artist statement is superfluous?

SC: Yeah. You know what? We don’t need to guide the viewer that closely. In fact, they’ll have more fun if they can look at something, stay with it a bit, and see what they get from it, rather than be fed a meaning that is limited. Because we’re all humans, we all have things that we share. We may not exactly know what they are, but they will come up in a way that’s emotional for somebody. It’ll be underneath language. That’s fine with me. Anything that has too many answers is not a good painting or artwork. [laughs]

Right now, I’m in a period where it’s not one single kind of image, it’s a lot of little marks
turning into words and other things and drips and stuff. I see that as a kind of pattern. The way we look around the world is we see patterns so that we can do things like cross the street. The stop sign is a pattern. The crosswalk is a pattern. All these are aids for us to navigate the world. So the painting, in a way, is that kind of thing too.

I want my paintings to be accessible like a song is. This is about pattern recognition again—people recognize an aspect of themselves. They want to live with it, see that aspect more. And I also want my work to seem like it’s graffiti on the wall of a bathroom, intimate and scatological at the same time.

RB: I want to talk about two prints that we made together. I picked them partially because of what’s written in them. The first one is a print titled Good Luck. It shows a field of bricks of all different colors, and in the center there is a note: “Freud sez: When you think of me - think of Rembrandt - a little light and a lot of darkness.” Why is it called Good Luck?

Squeak Carnwath: GOOD LUCK, 2003 Color aquatint with soft and hard ground etching, 36 ½ x 35” Edition of 35

SC: Good question.
RB: That print was done in 2003. That was a long time ago.

SC: I like those school notebook pages. For our generation, we used pencils, not phones and computers. It calls you back to a place where you touch something.

RB: Tell me more about the Freud quote.

SC: I’m fascinated by psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy. So when somebody says something smart like that, I’m very interested. And I love Rembrandt. Freud is right. If you think about Rembrandt and how in the shadows everything is...it’s a deep place to go to.

RB: Speaking of quotes, there’s a print we did in 2011 called Unknown. The image is two candlesticks, one light and one dark, and behind it is this ornate pink wallpaper. What’s written at the bottom is, “Flourish in the unknown and the unknowable.”

SC: Don’t you want to be in that place? It’s like a forest. It’s about taking the opportunity to get lost, to not know where you’re going and not be judgmental about it. It’s a kind of permission Giving.

RB: To yourself.
SC: Or anybody else who wants it.

RB: I want to read you one last thing John Yau wrote: “I think what distinguishes Carnwath’s diaristic works from those of others working in this vein is that her observations don’t seem rooted in an ‘I’ that we can equate with the artist. Rather, the questions she asks and the information she addresses include the viewer. If anything—and this is one of the artist’s great strengths—her work is open and inviting.”

SC: That’s what I want it to be. I want a painting to call people to it from across the room, and then once they get there, nose to the surface of the painting, there is something for the viewer to see. I do feel like I’m a conduit and receiving radio waves, which sounds nuts. But you know what? I think we’re supposed to be highly sensate and receive information and use it where it will do the most good. For me, that’s in the paintings. We have to receive rather than always try to be stuck on our own selves.

Squeak Carnwath: NOT KNOWN, 2011 Color Aquatint and Hard Ground etching, 37" x 36" Edition of 35

Squeak Carnwath 2022

Photography by Eve Aschheim

Auerbach works with airbrush on embossed paper

Tauba Auerbach made prints with the press twice prior to her visit in 2010. The first two projects, one in 2002 and in 2008, were fairly straightforward. She learned the principles of intaglio printmaking while continuing to explore important themes in her work. Late in 2010, Tauba came to the press armed with rolls of nylon mesh, rubber floor matting, and chicken wire. Her idea was to use these materials as matrices for creating embossments in the soft 100% cotton rag paper that is commonly used for etchings.

We set up the press differently for each material, depending on its physical qualities—the thick matting, the thin mesh, the sharp wire. We used thick, old wool blankets to use as cushions for the various surfaces we forced through the press.

We spent days experimenting with the pressure on the press to find the right dampness for the paper to get a perfect embossment without wrinkles. These embossments were put on open-air racks, where the paper undulated gently as it dried.

Tauba Auerbach: Embossment Painting No. 5, 2011

Once dry, the paper was prepared by masking the edges to keep the margins white. Tauba then used an airbrush to carefully coat the dry embossed paper with various colors. She angled her airbrush so that, as the fine spray landed on the paper, it captured the embossment’s impression as well as the undulation of the dried, thick cotton paper. After these embossment paintings were dry, the paintings were put in a paper press to flatten the paper.

The end result is a painting on paper that is a remarkable 3D trompe l'oeil. But in fact, these paintings function as a beautiful historical record of how the surface of the paper was changed, first by embossment and then by drying.

During that project, Tauba created several different bodies of work. All of them related to her interest in the intersection between our perceptions of 2D and our perceptions of 3D.

Tauba Auerbach: Topo Slice/Fold I, and Topo Slice/Fold II, 2011 Color Aquatint etching

One elegant example is her two prints Topo Slice/Fold I and Topo Slice/Fold II. These are images that were made by taking a 2D plane, a piece of paper, and folding it into a small irregular shape made 3D by the folding. Tauba then cut the tightly folded paper into regular parallel strips, carefully numbering each fragment of paper with the order in which it was cut. Once completely sliced, the paper strips were unfolded and reconstructed as a single flat plane again. The cut paper served as a stencil to make two copper plates for each image: the even slices and the odd slices. When the plates were etched and finished, color proofing began. Tauba assigned colors to each slice, allowing us to visually reconstruct the folding and slicing history of the paper. In essence, she created a topographical recording of the history of folding and then slicing the paper.

1. Reassembled folded and sliced paper on top copper plate.2. Water flattens the cut paper and sticks paper to plate. Odd slices removed exposing copper plate creates a stencil.3. Spray painted copper plate with stencil paper removed. — 1. Reassembled folded and sliced paper on top copper plate.
2. Water flattens the cut paper and sticks paper to plate. Odd slices removed exposing copper plate creates a stencil.
3. Spray painted copper plate with stencil paper removed.

In 2011, Tauba also created her book [2,3]. This beautiful boxed set of six portfolios, each with a different hand-cut popup enclosed, takes the concept of 2D versus 3D to a whole new level.