I'm involved in SGIA (Specialty Graphic Imaging Association) and go to their annual conventions on a regular basis, I used to sell equipment and got to know a lot of printers from all over the world. Most never thought they would be printers, they did kind of fall into it. And most printers, if you scratch hard enough, still want to do art prints, even though they may be running a printed circuit plant, or making basketball backboards for the NBA. One of the most respected screenprinters in the industry worldwide - and I'm talking ceramics, printed circuits, outdoor signage, textiles, garments, architectural glass, tiles, consumer product decorating - the whole gamut of screenprinting - is Michael Caza of France. He's like the Yoda of it all - he is an art printer as well.

Then there's the whole Northwest Coast Native Art Limited Edition Print Movement - anyone who has been to British Columbia, Canada, knows the style and has seen the prints. I only work with a small percentage of the artists, but this is huge, a multimillion-dollar-per-year art sector - all based on a few hippy screenprinters and some young native artists who were just rediscovering their heritage after 60 years of systematic eradication by the government and the church getting together in Victoria and Vancouver in the late 60's and early 70's. The art style has existed for eons, the screenprints only a few decades.

I met a fellow who came to take a course with me, who had a business finding and restoring old gas pumps from across North America. Car collectors would buy the stuff to put in their garages with their restored vehicles. He wanted to make the old glass globes with the cool logos of the old companies, as they were almost impossible to find in good condition. There was a time in the earlier part of the 1900's where literally hundreds of local oil companies sold gas, and they all had very distinct logos and graphics on their pumps. They are made by screenprinting ceramic ink (the same kind used on all your plates and cups and beer glasses) on a thick sheet of glass, then slump firing the glass so it bends into a mold. Another example of lost screenprinting technology since before the advent of plastics. He's doing so well now he's bought an automatic press to keep up with the orders!

One of the most interesting screenprinting success stories has to do with the current crop of rock poster artists. This is a mini explosion that has influenced contemporary graphic-design trends and a lot of the 'trashed retro' look you see in advertisements. It's almost single handily driving a big interest in screenprinting amongst art students. You can check it out on www.gigposters.com .

I am involved in the American Poster Institute (API) which holds semi
annual exhibitions called Flatstock, this one in Seattle, Washington, USA.

How did you get into screen printing? Were you one of those juvenile delinquents who only passed art class and auto shop?

The first screen print I ever did was an image of Jimi Hendrix. That was in high school art class. I didn't do another print until 1979, when I was the advertising manager for a chain of automotive stores. I started making showcards for sales in the stores. I eventually quit my advertising job and apprenticed in a screen and sign shop because I got fascinated with making things, as opposed to selling carburetors. Eventually I owned a full on screenshop with automatic presses and a bunch of employees. I got out of that in '93 and built my studio on Vancouver Island so I could concentrate on art printing and teaching and having some fun in life..... and here we are today.

This is the official photograph of today's Squeegeeville...

...and this is what it looked like after the fire, before it was rebuilt.
Andy says, "We had a bad fire in April 2004, which destroyed my
bike and a big part of the studio. Both are back better than ever.
The local fire department are our heroes, they saved our house."

Are there toxic and less-toxic screen printing? Can you water the roses with the residues?

There has been a wholesale shift in the last few years to less toxic screenprinting. There is no reason for artists to use anything but waterbased inks, because they are only working on paper or canvas for the most part. Waterbased inks eliminate a lot of the bad smells and toxic fumes that used to be part of every screen shop. With proper filtration and the use of biodegradable reclaiming chemistry, you can water the roses with the wastewater. Most commercial shops have switched to UV inks which cure by passing under a special UV lamp instead of solvent evaporation, so they have gotten rid of the VOC's in the air. And where shops still use solvent based inks, workers can minimize their exposure by using personal safety equipment such as gloves and respirators when handling organic solvents, an installing simple venting systems in their studios.

How's the weather over there on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, where our master printer and author lives with his charming wife, Nancy?

Well, we've been in the middle of a fog bank that's blanketed the whole coast for the last week, but apparently if you drive up to the local ski hill, they are bathed in sunlight and covered in snow. Not much fun on the motorcycle. I was walking the dog last night on our street in the fog and a large six-point buck (six-year-old male deer) jumped a fence and landed right in front of us. He just gave us the hairy eyeball and calmly walked away.


We also need some more interesting biographical material, with more about your life as a rock´n roll biker, culture activist, PR creep, and like that. (Where all is revealed...)

I grew up in a small town in Ontario Canada, typical Canadian kid, had a newspaper column when I was 17, got turfed from highschool for something I wrote about my principal, and became a mailman, one of the world's greatest jobs. I'd been playing guitar since my teens, and as I got older started playing in rock bands in bars. Playing till 2:00 a.m. and then reporting for work at 7 a.m., then walking 12 miles was fun for a while, but after four years I opted for full on Rock 'n Roll. I was in a couple of forgettable bands, played bass for Tiny Tim for a week one time, worked in a dairy and eventually migrated west to British Columbia, where I still live 30 years later.

A lot of my interest in art and graphics comes from my dad, who was a kind of renaissance man in a suit. He started out as a sign maker in highschool (some of his signs were still around town when I was kid) then went off to fight in World War II, where the air force quickly turned him into a draughtsman. Afterwards he worked his way up in the design department of a big steel fabrication shop, then got into sales, and then plant management. At home he played the banjo and organ and taught my sister and me how to hand letter and draw, and built an electric guitar that started me down my musical path. One day he brought home a camera, next thing we had a darkroom in the basement and he was winning awards. He had some kind of mid-life crisis and quit the place he had worked at for 20 years, then became the sales and marketing manager for a logging equipment manufacturer, which allowed him to use his photography, his drawing and lettering skills (he could comp an ad up in five minutes) and his copywriting ability. When he retired, he got into computers big time.

About the time my daughter was coming along I made the decision to put the music career on hold and get a job, any job. So I start driving delivery truck for an automotive chain up in Edmonton, Alberta, and it comes out that I know how to letter signs. I start making signs for their stores, next thing I know I'm the advertising manager. I'd always been the business guy in the bands I was in, and did the posters and promo because I knew how to letter and draw and cartoon a bit. Remember kids, this is back in the days before computers. This was a great job because I got to do everything - the company was growing like crazy, so I was creating and producing radio, TV, and print ads, plus insuring the stores had window signs and POP displays to push the products. That's where the flying squeegee hit me right between the eyes.

I found I liked screenprinting so much, I ended up leaving the advertising career and the car parts behind, and started working in screen and sign shops, learning it from the shop floor up. By 1985 I had started my own company in Vancouver, which coincided with Expo 86 - we happened to be located two blocks from the World's Fair site-- and ended up doing a massive amount of display work in a lot of the pavillions. We won some awards for print design, got a rep for doing the jobs nobody else would touch, and started attracting a few artists interested in limited-edition printing. Most of the other art printers at the time were working on crude equipment. We had a lot of nice presses and gear, and had developed the ability to run highly technical images, so we were able to print things that were not normally done in the fine art screenprinting world. It was good to work on something that was appreciated and valued when it was done, not thrown out because the sale was over. I also realized that of all the things we printed, the art was the most lucrative, and the artists were way more fun than the suits from the advertising agencies who used to drive us insane with impossible deadlines.

Building the company up cost a lot of time and money and the fun was driven out of it by the constant struggle with financing more equipment, training employees and dealing with their social problems, and expanding and moving three times in five years. My wife wanted to get out of Vancouver and get our teenage daughters back to a smaller town, so I sold the company and we moved to Courtenay on Vancouver Island, where we still live today. I built Squeegeeville studio in my backyard in 1995 and incorporated a solar exposing bay, got some nice production toys including a 4'x5' parallel lift one arm press, some smaller presses,
racks, etc., and started working with artists and a few commercial clients.

Now I don't know if anyone noticed, but around these parts the art market died in the mid 1990's, just after I opened my studio. So I started writing more, played in an R&B band, worked for the as a marketing and promotions director, ran a federal election campaign, started a project to turn the old firehall here into an art gallery, did PR for the Vancouver Island Musicfest, and along the way developed an ability to fundraise for other arts related projects. The most recent was startup funds for a Shakespeare Festival here - I wrote a grant that got them $110,000 in seed money. I also started teaching people to screenprint, and this part of the business has really taken off. I have had students from all over North America come here, and have taken the squeegee on the road too. I have worked in the Yukon with Native artists for a week at a retreat and last summer taught a course to six ladies that work behind the scenes at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont. They were dyists, costumers, and prop makers - they use screenprinting to make custom cloth for period costumes and backdrops. I've also been selling specialized large format screenprinting equipment on the side, (www.tmiscreenprinting.com) but that's a story for another day.

As far as hobbies go, I guess motorcycling is mine - beer drinking isn't a hobby, is it Miguel? I lost a restored 1975 BMW 600/6 in a fire last year, but managed to find a 1989 RT100 that took the pain away. In the warm months you can find me roaring down some twisty back road in the mountains. I would rather ride than print any day.

You can learn more about the fascinating world of
Andy MacDougall at his website: www.squeegeeville.com.