What is your name?
Oli Watt
Where are you from?
Chicago, Illinois.
What is the name of your studio?
Free Range
Who is your favorite baseball team?
I don’t know if I really have a favorite baseball team, but I do enjoy watching the Gas-House Gorillas play ball. Gas-House Gorillas
Who are your favorite printmakers?
Frans Masereel, Marcel Duchamp (he was initially a printmaker and I think his work was always made from the perspective of someone interested in multiples), H.C. Westermann. Ed Ruscha.
What was your first job as an artist?
Cutting stencils out of film for a small t-shirt company.
Where did you discover printmaking and how did you get into it?
I remember my very first linoleum cut from about 3rd grade. It was a panther in the jungle printed over a watercolor gradient. I really got into printmaking when I briefly lived in Germany in the early 90s. I spent a lot of time in galleries looking at woodcuts. I started making a lot of block prints around that time.
What do you like most about carving wood?
Wood talks back. I can never be 100% in control when carving wood.
What is one tool you could not create without?
A pencil.
What is your biggest rule in the print shop?
Respect the process--Don’t try too hard to make the thing look like something you already have in your mind.
How has this pandemic changed your life as an artist? What has stayed the same?
I’ve started giving away more prints. I’ve accumulated years and years of my own prints, somehow pretending they have all this value sitting in my flat files in my studio. I’m realizing they have much more value if they can exist in many places at once, out in the world…the wonderful, potentially subversive characteristic of multiples. My studio practice for the most part has remained the same. I have a little more time in the studio these days, but my approach has remained the same. Not all artists work in constant solitude (it can be difficult for printers depending on community facilities), but it’s always been my preferred method. I don’t think the pandemic has affected the content of my work.
For more information about Oli’s work, visit www.theskiclubmilwaukee.com/oli-watt
By Mike Stark, June 2020.