Shara Hughes, a Whitney Biennial Standout, Moves On to Monoprints

The Stars Don’t Lie (2018), monotype with oil-based ink, 38.5 x 29 inches© Shara Hughes. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pace Prints.

If you think of a traffic jam of high-wattage colors and way-far-out, imaginary landscapes where a fried egg in the sky is the sun (or the moon) and tall color-drunk trees are people, most likely you’ve entered the world of Shara Hughes’s paintings. Hughes was a standout in last year’s Whitney Biennial, with a room of her own. Now she’s on to monoprints, the most painterly of all the print techniques—I’ve always thought of monoprints as the aristocrats of printmaking. Unlike most prints, which come in multiple editions, a monoprint is a unique image— a printed painting. Hughes has made a cornucopia of them for her debut show, “Surprise Anxiety,” at Pace Prints, which opens on March 1 and runs through April 14. Their titles suggest the visual high jinks in store for viewers: The Stars Don’t Lie, Happier Underground, Even Your Bad Mood is Sweet, Softening to Sanity.

Hughes spoke with me over the weekend about her new relationship to the printmaking process, and why an artist would choose to make a magnificent painting and then transfer it, backward, to a piece of paper.


Why did you choose to do monoprints?

At RISD I took printmaking, and it really helped me understand the importance of layering in painting. I am the type of person who likes the challenge of figuring something out through many different tries. With monoprints, each time I started a new piece, I really had to start completely over and approach it from what I had learned from the print before – mainly I learned from the mistakes I was making.

Why make a monoprint when you could make a painting? Painting is hard enough, but doesn’t the monoprint process make it so much harder? Why did you do it?

The printing process does seem so much harder, but that’s from a painter’s point of view. For me, it just seems so backwards— well, it literally is painting backwards. I was trying to figure out a way to use this process as something I couldn’t do in my studio or without a press. I didn’t want to make something that looked like my paintings. I wanted an extension of what I do regularly. I found that you really can’t get away with anything with the monoprint process. Every little smudge is going to transfer and show all your mistakes. In some ways, it made me more selective about color and commitment to mark-making than I usually am. In other words, I needed to make a mark that I wouldn’t erase or paint on top of for it to look how I wanted it to look when it transfers to the white paper. If you layer one color on top of the other on the plate, the colors will mix, whereas if you layer one color on top of another in painting, it won’t necessarily mix. What you see is what you get. With the monoprint, what you see is definitely not what you get. This is something I had to get used to and learned to eventually really like about it. But it was a gradual like. I made decisions with the prints that I wouldn’t necessarily make with painting that I had to stick with and couldn’t go back into to touch up, which was hard, but something I really valued.

Truth in Your Shadows (2018), monotype with oil-based ink, 38.5 x 29 inches© Shara Hughes. Photo courtesy of the artist and Pace Prints.

Is it more time consuming to make a monoprint vs a painting?

Hmm. Well, I’m not sure what takes longer. My stubbornness with the monoprints and wanting to get them right maybe pushed me to make them faster than a painting. But also you really do have to sit down and finish the print when you go in because you don’t want the ink to set up differently and not transfer to the paper. So time does matter in printing, as it may not as much with painting. Also, the size difference from my regular large-sized paintings vs the smaller print-size was an adjustment. It takes me a very long time to make a small painting— months, maybe. So to sit down and make a full painting on a plate a few times a day was challenging, but I really learned a lot from it.

It’s so indirect, and you don’t know what you’re going to get.

The surprise of not knowing how it will turn out was something I tried to embrace, although it definitely gave me an anxiety of disappointment.

Say a little more about the process itself– is it pleasurable in any way? Does it allow you to do things you can’t in other media?

If you paint on a plate and run it through the press, most of the ink is lifted off the plate and onto the paper, but some of the ink remains on the plate. If you take that exact plate and run it through the press again, that’s what is called the “ghost,” as it will be the exact image from the first print but a lighter ghost-like version. I really loved that idea, and wanted to figure out a way to use that in the prints— that would be something I couldn’t do in my own work. Instead of printing back onto the same print, I basically used the first run through the press as a way to make a lighter mark of a flatter field of color for the final image. I would paint on a plate, run it through the press, and take the same plate back with the lighter ink still on the plate and paint right on top of it. That second time painting on the plate would then turn out to be the one and only final monoprint that would exist. I liked using this technique because it left a lot up to chance that I couldn’t completely see on the plate. The result was always a surprise— good or bad. It was definitely pleasurable, because I liked that surprise aspect, but again, [it] provoked an anxiety of letting go of control. In painting you always see what you are doing, so the ghost process and the subtleness of painting on a plate that won’t let you get away with anything— while feeling blindfolded— was very challenging, but exciting at the same time.


Is that why you call the show "Surprise Anxiety"?

The title parallels the feeling of working really hard on something for an extended amount of time, feeling like you put everything into it, and are actively trying to control the result, and then letting go of that control to the big reveal of the transfer onto the paper. It’s the surprise of yes or no, and having to live with it any way. Technically you can do whatever you want after that print. You can go back into, and print as many times as you want, but I liked having a rule to rein me in. I definitely feel a communal anxiety in the world, so maybe I’m reflecting on that.

What did you learn? Has it affected your painting? If so, how?

I’ve learned a different sort of finesse and commitment to marks that I don’t need to revisit once they have been executed. I’m recently back in the studio, painting, so I think this may still TBD. I’m always looking to be simpler, but that seems to take a very long time.

Now that you’ve got the hang of it, will you do it again?

Yes! I hope to make it a new part of my studio practice. I think it’s important to find other ways to make you think differently, which printmaking definitely does.