GLENN LOWRY: When Bill Goldston, Director of Universal Limited Art Editions, was approached by a gallery in Beijing to make an exhibition of prints, he immediately thought of his longtime friend and collaborator, artist Robert Rauschenberg. When Goldston proposed the project, Rauschenberg was indeed interested.
BILL GOLDSTON: He said, “I’m looking through all these old photographs that I took in China in the early 80s. I think I’ll be able to figure out something.” He picked out a bunch of images from a stack of photographs. They were over 20 years old. They were faded.
GLENN LOWRY: Goldston made high-resolution scans of these photographs, restoring the color when he could. He then printed the images on transfer sheets and panels that the artist was able to manipulate. Goldston enlarged them to produce the final images.
BILL GOLDSTON: The lotus plant appears in all of the images. And his reasoning for using it was because it’s a symbol of purity. I decided that I was going to extract his transferring of the lotus plant from each one of them and I was going to make it as a photogravure.
And rather than make a square plate, we cut it to the contour of the image so that you could see it. So it embosses the plate right around it.
There’s this beautiful pure sheet with this gorgeous image on it, with this beautiful gravure of this lotus pushed right into the paper from the etching.