Keeping Up Appearances

Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints. When I was little I went to a private school. There weren't many kids there and we saw the same people every year. Needless to say, it was an extremely sheltered environment to be in from age six to thirteen. Sex ed was nonexistent, and the teachers would rather not talk about it anyway. Sex was for procreation, and so was marriage. If you kissed someone, you got detention. If you held hands, your name got written up. Relationships - real relationships - didn't exist. In highschool I was a pariah. Undersocialized and over educated, I was labeled many things. So, rather than friends or boyfriends, I developed relationships with the images in my head. I began to draw. Drawing is a relationship I am extremely comfortable with. I always begin with a drawing. Drawing directs everything. My discovery happens with a drawing; the painting part seems to be just an afterthought. In college, my drawings got better, and I began to draw things that had been in my head since eigth grade. My undersocialization as a girl has lent itself very strongly to my work. The figures tend to be strange girl-women, not quite children and not quite grown. The