It’s been a while since Curtis Waller has been in a classroom, but he still has to deal with copycats.

And he might find reason to complain if the perpetrators — Lexington’s River Wood Hall printing company — didn’t also copy the work of Bob Timberlake and Texas Civil War artist John Paul Strange.

Obviously they’ve done a “remarque”able job with the six previous paintings Waller left in their hands, otherwise he might not have chosen to have his newest piece, “The Reed House,” reproduced there.

River Wood Hall, formerly Hall Printing Company, was acquired by Carolina Envelope and Bob Timberlake Gallery last year. Established in 1919, the company recently moved from High Point.

When first considering making offset lithograph prints of his work, Waller and his daughters Denise Waller-Overcash and Kelly Waller-Doyle visited a local printing company but left dissatisfied. That’s when Waller’s friend, Mooresville artist Cotton Ketchie, told him about the place that prints his reproductions.

“Come on over,” Ketchie recommended. Waller accepted his invitation and has done business at River Wood Hall ever since.

“This place is top of the line,” Waller says.

That might be an understatement. The company is known for having won Printing Industries of America, or PIA, awards for the best art reproduction in the country and first-place awards from Printing Industries of the Carolinas, PICA.

But the reason they turn out quality reproductions, says plant manager Ron Rice, is because of the sychronicity of the staff, most of whom have worked together an average of 25 years.

Not to mention the sometimes tedious process by which they produce the prints.

Originally, the procedure started when an artist would bring in the genuine painting. From that, Rice says, they would shoot a transparency (a slide) of it which is then visually scanned and separated into the primary colors — yellow, cyan (blue) and magenta (red) — and black, creating four pieces of film.

The film’s image is burned onto a plate and the plates and inks are loaded into the printing press. Computers measuring the amounts of the four colors are monitored and adjusted accordingly, as are the position of the plates.

Then the real work begins.

Rice, production manager Ron Collins and the artist will examine the print.

“We might change the color of the ink … play with them a little bit,” Rice says. “But we’re wary of that.”

And rightfully so. “Some colors are not reproducible in our process,” Rice explains, which he referred to as “our gamut of colors.”

“There’s just a certain range of colors you are able to produce within a four-color process,” he says. “We can extend that gamut by printing additional colors which we do sometimes … the record is 27 colors on one print or 27 passes through one press.”

That is to help give the illusion of a color that is not achievable.

“We (manipulate) the colors around it and change them to make that color look more like it’s supposed to.”

One of the other challenges they face when creating a print with the former method is the value relationships of light to dark colors.

“If you have that, it doesn’t matter whether or not some colors match exact but you’ve got to have the value relationship correct,” Rice says.

His experienced eye has helped even Waller notice the differences in color and, sometimes, make adjustments.

“When Ron printed ‘Alexander Long House’ (we noticed) the grass in the bottom of mine is lighter. Ron said, ‘Let’s go a little bit darker with it.’ So we did and the print was actually prettier than the original.”

That proves, Rice says, that sometimes artists will actually use the reproduction process as a tool to create another product.

But they no longer use the transparency method. Now they scan the artwork with a digital scanning camera that will feed the image directly into a computer. The image can be color manipulated with programs such as PhotoShop and saved as a file in another program, such as QuarkXPress.

Times, processes change

“For the last eight years we’ve been having to go the transparency route because the direct separation on camera is no longer available,” Rice says. “We were one of only two (companies) in the world still doing that process and since there was only two of us doing it, Kodak stopped making the film. But even the best transparency in the world is not the best. So you spend a lot of time correcting the color from that transparency and matching it to the original. With this new process … the quality is so much better, as is the turnaround time. It will now take an hour where it used to take seven to 10 days.”

It’s a very complicated process to even come as close as they do, Rice says, because when the artist is in front of the canvas they can mix their colors. But the printers are only dealing with the three primaries.

“We try, very hard, to always do that perfect print. We haven’t done it, though we do some that are great.”

Waller-Overcash says she has enjoyed working with River Wood Hall because they have helped her more fully understand the printing process, which better helps her market her father’s art.

“For me it’s very educational,” Waller-Overcash says. “The more I know about it, the more we can prepare and have stuff easier to print. We know what colors are hard to achieve, the differences in the paper, the way the paper takes the color. This way we know what not to do.”

A closer look

Often Waller-Overcash will watch the press run as it copies a painting.

“There are very few people we work with that we like to take back to the pressroom because it’s dangerous,” says Rice. “When we’re getting ready to run, it’s good not to have too many people back there … these guys need to concentrate on what they’re doing because they can get hurt.”

“I have to tell you, Curtis and Denise and the family are some people that we really enjoy working with,” Rice adds. “Ever since they started working with us, they’ve been one of the most pleasant groups of people we deal with.”

The printing process is thousands of years old. In “Décor” magazine, Louise King wrote that five millennia ago, prints were made by engraving designs on cylindrical seals and running them across clay tablets. Since then, King writes, the processes have evolved, including:

• Relief printing: The oldest form of printmaking by which the artist draws a design on a block or plate then uses small knives and gouges to cut away the material from between the lines. Ink is applied to the raised surfaces and an impression is taken of the block or plate.
• Woodcutting: Involves the use of a plank cut parallel to a tree trunk. The artist draws on the plank then cuts away the wood not covered by the design.
• Linocut: A modification of woodcutting, carving the matrix from a sheet of linoleum instead of wood.
• Engraving: An intaglio method of printing. The plate is cut, scratched or etched so the lines go below the surface of the material on which they are drawn. Engraving involves v-shaped trenches that are cut into the surface by a graver or burin.
• Etching: Uses a metal plate coated by a material called the “ground,” which resists acid, on which the artist draws the design with a sharp needle that removes the ground where it touches.
• Drypoint: The artist works directly on the plate with a sharp needle called a scribe.
• Aquatint: Was invented in the 18th century and used by artists to achieve wash effects on etchings.
• Lithography: The method by which Waller’s paintings are copied, is a form of lanographic printing by which the image is printed off a flat surface rather than cut into a surface or raised above it.
• Stone lithography: The design is drawn on a slab or fine-grained limestone which is then etched with a mixture of acid and gum arabic.

Finally, during inspection of prints against the original, they have to consider where the print is going to be displayed. That is, under what lighting conditions — natural kitchen window light, fluorescent light in a study, lamp lighting in a living room — the picture will be hung.

Different looks

With that in mind, they have a viewing room equipped with different lighting fixtures to simulate lighting conditions. Lighting also plays a role in considering how close to the original the colors are.

“Under some light the print will be warmer than the original,” Rice says. “It deals with half-tones, where you’re really only seeing half of what is there because you’ve got half the paper (showing) through.”

The advantage to producing a print, Rice says, is artists might want to produce a piece they feel is sellable to a mass market. Creating an original is easy, but when reaching a larger market is the goal, prints are the key.

“That is why we want to reproduce the feel of the original because each piece has its own feel and atmosphere. We print feel, we don’t print colors to match exactly,” Rice says. “There’s only one original. We don’t print originals and we have never reproduced and matched anything in our lives since we’ve been in business. We just come closer than anybody else.”

Which, he says, helps bring back regular, and attract new clients.

“Everybody we work with, we want them to become part of our family because they are our future,” he says. “We don’t want artists to come try us out and do one print. We want them to be here for their lifetime.”