Flatbed keeps old art traditions alive

The smell of ink pleasantly permeates the former warehouse in East Austin that Flatbed Press calls home. But that now-anachronistic aroma serves as a reminder that in our Internet age, Flatbed remains a place where a centuries-old art-making process still goes on a workshop from which come original prints that land in the collections of noted institutions such as New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

There's no romantic scent of ink at the Austin Museum of Art, where "Advancing Tradition: Twenty Years of Printmaking at Flatbed Press" is on view through Feb. 13.

Yet the evidence of the singular — and often little-known — collaboration between artist and printmaker emerges in the more than 50 prints on display.

If you consider the prints closely, that is.

Fine art printmaking is arguably one of the more misunderstood art mediums, increasingly more so in the digital era, when people have the means to capture, reproduce and alter images, often with just a cell phone.

For starters, prints from workshops such as Flatbed are not reproductions or copies of, say, a painting. Each is handmade together by the artist and printmaker, using either a lithographic stone, a copper plate or a wood block. Each is signed and numbered by the artist.

And though Flatbed Press is one of the most esteemed studios of its kind in the United States and well known to art world professionals and insiders — and though it staked out one of the first artists' hives in East Austin — it flies relatively under the radar.

"Fairly frequently, people will still discover us," says Mark L. Smith with a bemused smile. Smith co-founded Flatbed Press along with Katherine Brimberry in 1990.

"Yeah, we just had someone the other day come over here after they saw the exhibit at AMOA who said they had never heard of us before," adds Brimberry with a gentle laugh.

Brimberry and Smith, both 63, share the lightly musical twang of similar Texas Panhandle upbringings, though both came to printmaking from completely different routes.

Brimberry is the master printmaker, an artist in her own right with much teaching experience, the patient collaborator who guides sometimes-antsy artists through the painstaking process of matching their vision with the parameters of a printing press.

Smith is the art history scholar, a former associate dean of the College of Fine Arts at University of Texas, a one-time corporate art adviser and over the years, Flatbed's marketing and business conduit.

Austin had a much smaller art scene 20 years ago when Brimberry and Smith decided to go into the fine art printmaking business together. UT's art department had an already well-funded guest-artist-in-printmaking program, and its museum was well on its way in developing a noted print collection. Austin artists already were fairly print-savvy, interested in the collaborative medium that allowed for creative risk-taking. ("One of the reasons artists like to make print is to freshen up their artistic aesthetic, to re-energize their creative juices," suggests Smith.)

Downtown Austin at the time had affordable warehouse space. Brimberry and Smith set up business — as an independent for-profit concern — in a now-demolished building where the Spring condominium stands.

Brimberry and Smith settled on the name "Flatbed" for their new venture, a reference to what art historian Leo Steinberg referred to as the horizontal plane on which a print is made — vastly different from how paintings are typically painted on a vertically oriented easel. (In more Austin fine art print synergy, the Blanton Museum of Art now owns Steinberg's own massive print collection.)

And though it's a business like any other, the profits remain slim. Flatbed takes on the up-front financial burden of the printmaking venture, dividing the editioned prints with the artist (editions generally run to 20) and selling the remainder to individual and corporate collectors. Generally, prints start at about $500 and above, with prints by top-collected artists — Julie Speed, Michael Ray Charles, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Katie van Scherpenberg — selling for as much as $5,000.

"We were close to the ground starting out and without a whole a lot of money," says Smith. "We still don't make a lot of money, but it helps that we're very stubborn."

By the time the business partners moved their operation to the sprawling facility in East Austin in 2000, Brimberry and Smith had a roster of regional, national and international artists with whom they had created prints and were well-known to art scholars and collectors — and well-respected as creative collaborators.