Tugboat pioneers homemade prints

Tugboat Printshop

412-621-0663

298 Main Street,… Tugboat Printshop

412-621-0663

298 Main Street, Lawrenceville

www.tugboatprintshop.com

Fans of traditional mediums, take note: Pittsburgh’s Tugboat Printshop hopes to rekindle the often overlooked art of printmaking.

Located in nearby Lawrenceville, the shop is owned and operated by Paul Roden and Valerie Lueth, a husband and wife duo  that that turns out a variety of originally designed and handmade prints and woodcuts, each one laden with intricate detail.

Printmaking has, according to Pitt Studio Arts professor Lenore Thomas, enjoyed a resurgance in popularity in recent years. Thomas — who teaches several printmaking courses — explained that there is a wide appeal to printmaking, both for the artist and the potential buyer.

“Certainly the idea of accessibility can be exciting to artists. Print is often referred to as the democratic medium because the artist can make multiples and share them with lots of different people,” she said. “The rise in popularity of street art might be part of it. Also, the DIY movement has made craft more popular and people often lump printmaking into a craft-based art. Stores like Urban Outfitters have sold mini screen-print and relief-block kits.”

Each print from Tugboat Printshop is carefully designed and drawn out by either Roden or Lueth. The two then finish every project together, each taking care of one aspect of the final version.

Roden, who got his master of fine arts degree in printmaking from the University of South Dakota, commented on the process.

“We work pretty well together, and the work allows the process to be collaborative. There are about three levels of editing, three to six prints going back and forth. We’re each picking up one after the other,” Roden said.

“We don’t mind sitting next to one another,” Lueth joked — each print can take several hours to complete. Before becoming a printmaker, Lueth served as an artistic designer for  video games.

When asked why they chose printing — a noticeably older method of producing graphic art — both Roden and Lueth responded that there was a myriad of reasons for their choice in business. The most compelling one was the craft’s blue-collar sensibility.

“It’s the grandfather of graphic design — a reproduction of imagery that has a working-class mentality,” Roden said.

“People have a variety of reasons for being drawn to printmaking. It can be very process-orientated which some people like and it is certainly hands-on. Again, the ability to make a lot of one image can also be appealing to people. Each area of printmaking has its own appeal,” Thomas said.

Every major aspect of a piece from Tugboat Printshop is produced in the couple’s Lawrenceville home, which doubles as their studio.

“People should understand everything we do is by hand,” Roden said of the couple’s work.

“We’ve had to work really hard, put in a lot of energy and effort,” Lueth said of the business, which has been growing despite the economic downturn’s unkindness toward the arts.

Thomas admitted that many of her colleagues have struggled over the past few years to sell their work, citing the common mentality among buyers that art is “a luxury and an unnecessary expense in hard times.”

But the Tugboat Printshop team managed to find a way to keep its business up and running.

“We took the approach that we weren’t going to let it bother us. We’re under our own direction, we’re in charge of our bottom line,” Roden said. “I guess we kind of have a ‘can-do’ attitude.”

That attitude flourished in Pittsburgh, where the ever-growing art scene has provided an affordable and receptive outlet for the couple’s business, to which both Lueth and Roden — who moved to the city from South Dakota — partially attribute their success.

“Pittsburgh never got sucked into the real-estate bubble. We were priced out of every other city, but Pittsburgh is very accommodating. The city should really market itself as a heaven for entrepreneurial, go-getting young people. There really is a lot going on here,” Roden said. “When the economy does turn around, we’ll see that we’ve really made something.”

Lueth’s and Roden’s designs can be viewed on Tugboat Printshop’s website or on the couple’s Etsy shop.