FINE ART PRINT
- Meiun Caroline MABY
- Jul 31
- 4 min read
Although I feel I have always held a paintbrush in my hand, sailing was my priority for a while.
At the time when I did two women's world championships in Hobie Cat 16 (1994/95), the American team asked me to try out for the selections for Bill Koch's project, Mighty Mary, the first Defender of the America's Cup whose crew was going to be entirely female.
I had to move to San Diego. I was barely 20 years old, had a rather autistic personality, and spoke very little English.
I remember the decisive discussion I had with my father, torn between two visceral aspirations: that of painting and that of being at sea.
While he was unwaveringly supportive, the choice to pursue a creative path won out over becoming a sailor—considering that it would be easier to stay connected to the ocean by having a life as an artist than the other way around.
I didn't lack courage, but I lacked self-confidence — and although I never stopped painting and drawing every day, I couldn't imagine proclaiming myself a painter: I needed a "real job".
After a stint at the interior design office of a shipyard in England, then at the front office of an American Forex broker, I tried to give up scattering.
In love with paper and art books, sensitive to engraving and the atmosphere of studios where sentinel machines are on watch, I chose to become a lithographer !
I started an internship at the renowned Atelier Desjobert in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, determined to learn on the job. The old companions in smocks, with gypsy beaks, did not welcome me with the good nature I had hoped for.
What was this young provincial girl from doing in their way?
Silent and reluctant to teach me how to tame horned beasts*, I quickly landed in an office, assigned to break down the colors of the works entrusted to me by the artists and transfer them to the films used to expose the metal plates.
Quickly understood and assimilated, this colorist job really lacked creative madness.
From time to time, renowned artists would drop by. On rare occasions, I was able to go down and watch them paint on stone, but more often than not, they came to check the rendering of the films before printing. They no longer sanded the masses of limestone piled up in the back of the studio; we faked it.
Oh mechanization! Oh disappointment! Farewell toad skins (peaux de crapaud = an uncontrollable ink effect) ! Bye bye slowness and magical surprises, the luminous hours of lithography were thus over.**
* Horned beast: name given to the imposing lever presses.
** Which 20 years later tends to be contradicted because wonderful art studios preserve and promote this know-how with incredible talent.
At the same time, the first digital fine art printers using pigment inks were launched and the results were astonishing: the color rendering was impressive in its density, its velvety texture and its depth...
