Upswing

In the beginning … there was passion, manifested only as doodles in the margins of school text books. From very early in our childhood, we knew exactly what we wanted to do with our lives. This passion, though possibly unrealized at the time, was not altogether arbitrary. Our grandfather, Alfred Paulsen, had been an illustrator throughout his entire professional life- 28 years of which he spent at NASA. Additionally, our father devoted a good deal of his spare time in the home workshop, crafting perfectly executed woodworks in the form of furniture, toys and various other goods. The desire to create, and the potential to do it with precision and imagination, was simply engrained in us. Growing older brought change in our motivation and expanded ideas of exactly what it was we wanted to create. In our teenage years, we found punk rock. By the time our school years were coming to a close, we’d found ourselves utterly immersed in the culture. Just a few short years later, our passion for music gave way to starting bands, signing record contracts and touring the nation. Our time spent in the trenches of a DIY music scene, and the knowledge acquired therein, would 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.