Art Wear | A T-shirt and Screen Printing Blog

And I have “repatriated” some oldies & picked up a few new-to-me prints that I liked. The collection groweth. I wish I had kept one of everything, but that was literally impossible, so after 30 years, I find myself with a few hundred t-shirts, and some holes in the collection. Flipping through racks at Goodwill or ThrifTown is kinda relaxing and it’s yielded some fruit.

(Click through in-line images for full-size photos)

5by5. We printed this one at Amplifier is 2008 or so, I think. Found it unworn at the Goodwill. 5 color on a discharge uderbase. We did really good work there. Not sure who Merlin is — some tech guru?

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Not the most exciting print, but ok, lets deal with the facts on the ground here — a man’s gotta eat. I love the art prints, I love the challenging discharge jobs, but sometimes, someone just needs their dang logo on a dang shirt, and they need it done right. These folks were customers for years and years, & they’d order 72 or 144 shirts every few months, and heck, they helped pay for my daughter to go to a good private Jr. High School. Thanks, Allied Health Careers.

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I bought this one new at the 2015 Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. They had last year’s-shirt on fire-sale, so I snagged a couple. It’s signed, but I can’t make out the artists’ name, &  I don’t know what shop printed it. It’s a great separation job, & reasonably well printed — 3 or 4 colors on a discharge underbase, though there are a couple minor flaws. Overall, a pretty impressive job.

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This one came complete with the cat hair. No idea who printed it — it just seemed at the moment like I should own a Billy Joe Shaver shirt, and so now I do.

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This one is actually from Colombia. I looked at the tag & the shirt was Hecho En Colombia, so I figure it was probably printed there. Who doesn’t want a shirt from Colombia? Seriously.

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I have no idea about this one, either. I just liked the print a lot. Very detailed, very crisp halftones, very cool artwork. A mystery. I googled Sine Quanon t-shirt & drew a blank on that logo.

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Frida! Marty at Be Bop used to print these for Tesoro’s Trading Co. We never printed the Frida shirt but we did a fair amount of work for Tesoro’s as well in the mid to late 90’s & one of their shirts ended up in Clueless. This print & shirt look new– unworn & unwashed, so it’s highly unlikely that it’s an oldie from the Bee Bop days, but whoever is printing it is almost certainly using the same film positives — I’ve seen them. They weren’t the best, but they weren’t the worst. There’s too much black in the clouds… anyway. Who doesn’t like Frida Kahlo? You? GET OUT.

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I Heart Austin shirts were all the rage in the 80’s. This isn’t an original — it’s printed on a Gildan & those blanks weren’t around in those days, but it’s a waterbase print, & though sometimes I hate Austin, I still <3 Austin.______________________________________________________________

Juke! Obama! Two Great Tastes That have great taste together! No idea why Juke did an Obama design, but I approve. When i see a Juke shirt, I buy it, and that’s pretty much that.

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KGSR Hearts For The Arts Blood Drive. KGSR was a huge client the entire time VG was open & we printed shirts for nearly all their events for nearly 15 years. I could go on about how wonderful to work with they were & how we got perks like tickets to their anniversary shows at the Austin City Limits taping studio, etc. Everyone who worked there was kind, friendly & generous. Best Customer Ever award, 10 years running. I kept a lot of the anniversary shirts & the hot sauce festival shirts, but this one eluded me until last month. Of course we didn’t print everything for them, but look at the back — I’m pretty sure we printed this one.

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Lobster Girl. Because I couldn’t NOT buy a shirt that said Lobster Girl. What sort of weirdo designed this? I don’t know, but now it’s mine.

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Magnolia Cafe. I’m only halfway sure we printed this one. It could be of 3 different vintages — possibly printed at Action Screen Graphics, because I think we added the 2nd location to the typesetting there. Possibly printed at Bee Bop, and possibly printed at Vreeland in the early 90’s after Bee Bop shut down. Either way, I could walk to the ink mixing table and mix both of those colors with my eyes closed. Actually, that would be a bad idea, but I can’t find a good euphemism for familiarity here.

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I just decided I should have an Obama Hope shirt because it was such an iconic design at the time. No idea where it was printed, but it’s new, unwashed & unworn. Pretty good for $1.99.

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Panama. Does what it says on the tin. Shirt made & printed in Panama, & who doesn’t want a shirt printed in Panama? Seriously.

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Longhorn Texas. This was from the very early days of Vreeland Graphics, before we had a computer — had to have ben late ’92 or early ’93. I recall this being a vry difficult print because the client had 4-color process separations made without consulting anyone, & we had to really play with the inks to get it to do anything. Also, this is a very washed & worn shirt — it was grungy enough that I was a little surprised a thrift store would accept it, but there it is. I’m not quite sure if it’s a bleached out natural cotton color, or if it’s a faded yellow white.

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Austin Reggae Festival 2011. No idea who designed it, no idea who printed it. It’s a well-executed print, though & also new– unwashed & unworn, so hey. I have a kind of soft spot since we did the father of the reggae fest, the Sunsplash shirts, waaay back in the 80’s.

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Robert Earl Keen, Wild Shiner Nights. We printed a LOT of Robert Earl Keen shirts at VG, including the iconic photo of his car burning in the parking lot of Willie’s 4th of July Picnic, & he always had challenging, fun designs. This one was 4 color process plus 2 spot colors — just about all our press could handle at the time. I kept one of nearly everything we did for him, except this one.

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Rosedale Ride, 1999. This is a big charity event that we printed every year up though 2007. Richard Whittington & co. always did the design & we would do the printing at a discount in return for a small “printed by” tagline which you can barely make out at the lower right.

Rosedale Ride 2000, See above.

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Tito’s Vodka started off with a very small run of shirts in the mid-2000’s. Then they kind of blew up. I’m not absolutely certain that we printed this one, at Vreeland but odds are good. I know their orders now are in the multiple thousands, wherever they’ve ended up.

Maybe I’ll run by the St. Vincent De Paul tomorrow.

And have begun to catalog & preserve my entire T-shirt collection. I’m in the early stages of this project, but I have so many shirts, and for so long have wondered “where is that shirt? What became of it? Do I have two of them? Should I keep this one or take it to the goodwill?” and this will help provide me and future generations (Hi Erin And Jacob!) with answers to these important questions.

I’ve started with the oldest ones first, as well as some of the ones I’ve already blogged about here, because I have pictures of them already at hand. I ended up choosing Filemaker Pro as the way to go because it seems pretty customizable. Everything is getting:

• A catalog number
• An official design name
• The date printed, if known
• The artist’s name, if known
• The name of the shop it was printed at, if known
• A freeform description filed for any historical notes
• A condition rating, as some are new & some are pretty ratty.

Here are a couple screenshots of what I’ve got so far — the main catalog data entry view, & a table view with sorting options.

Data Entry View

Table View

And at long last, I got a bunch of heavy-duty 12 X 12 4-mil. re-sealable bags from Uline so that I could keep them clean & preserve them as best as possible. I’m working on a method of printing stickers from the catalog so that I can attach them to the bags.

Folded, bagged & preserved Austin Chronicle Shirt from 1985 or so.

This may strike you as insane, and rightly so, but I anticipate when I am done that I will have one of the largest catalogued T-shirt collections known to man. Like having the world’s largest ball of twine, or something. 99% of the collection is stuff I have personally printed, but some of it is also old shirts from when I was a kid, concert shirts I’ve bought at shows, and a few Goodwill acquisitions that I just couldn’t pass up for a buck. Obviously, lots more of these will be showing up here as I work my way through them over the next, oh, 10 years or so.

~

So, anyway. (previously) We flew into Guadalajara on Aeromexico, from San Antonio. We took a greyhound bus to San Antonio, & somewhere near Buda, the bus’s brakes got stuck, and started to burn. Sitting on a bus gradually filling with the smell of fire the day after running from a burning building was pretty jarring. The bus pulled over & we sat in the grass near the frontage road & waited for another bus to retrieve us for about an hour, almost making us miss our plane.

Jeri’s dad picked us up from the airport. She broke the news to him about the fire right after we de-planed, so it was a pretty tense & uncomfortable few first minutes. We had brought Lou a VCR & I forget what other electronics, as “gifts” because their general importation was frowned upon, & we had trouble retrieving them at baggage claim. All I recall is Lou swearing a bunch, disappearing into the baggage offices of Aeromexico for nearly an hour, then eventually emerging with his VCR. I’m assuming he paid a bribe.

The airport is on the southern side of Guadalajara, right near the highway to Chapala, so all I saw of town at first was the last bits of it as we turned south for Chapala, where Lou lived. At the time, one of the worst slums in Mexico was in this area, and it seemed like we drove through it for over 5 minutes, even at highway speeds. I have a strong memory of corrugated tin roofs over hovels made of found wood & occasionally cinder block, with dirt roads barely wide enough for cars, electric wires strung willy-nilly, & open sewers. It was very eye-opening to 21-year-old me, & I never have looked at poverty in America the same again. I heard the city came through & cleaned up the slum some years back, & now I can find no evidence online of it ever having existed.

Lou lived on a golf course just west of Chapala, up the hill a couple of blocks from a really charming little village called San Nicolas. It wasn’t too far from his place into Chapala proper, so we spent some time in town there, too. I have a few pictures I took on that trip, no idea whose camera I borrowed. Bored, on about the third day there, we walked down to San Nicolas, ate lunch at a little Palapa that served fried minnows as an appetizer (crunchy & good) then caught the local bus into Chapala for the afternoon. Apparently, white people did not ride those busses in those days. The only seats were in the very back, & most of the people on the bus turned around & stared at us for a good ways. I don’t think they meant to be intimidating, but were just genuinely bemused by the sight of gringos on the local bus.

There were a lot of American & Canadian expatriate retirees living in  the area, & it’s a relatively well-off little corner of Mexico as a result. We went to some sort of 4th of July celebration put on by the American consulate I think, just for all the expats – I recall being bored out of my mind, but we were on Lou’s agenda.

Jeri And Lou Arsenault in Chapala.

At some point during the week, we wound up at the Guadalajara Country Club, and I bought an embroidered polo shirt, which I still own. Apart from the crazy slum, Guadalajara was a really lovely city, though I did not know what I was looking at history-wise as we drove through town. Crazy traffic rotundas.

We drove back to Texas with Lou, stopping in Guadalajara at a local screen print supply house to load up on inks, screens & squeegees so we could start over & resurrect the shop from the ruins on our return. There was a brand of ink called Sanchez, we bought quite a few quarts of that, 5 or 6 squeegees & some pre-stretched screens. The screens were metric — the 71 count thread, being equal to about a 200 mesh? I don’t know. I still have one of those frames in my attic, as of 2014. There was a limit on importations, so the sales guy very neatly divided our purchase into three invoices, each just below the importation tax line, & we declared them as “art supplies” at the border, & got away with it. His cadillac trunk was full, is all I know, & it gave us a chance to start again. That ink was great, too.

On the drive north, we went though the giant barranca just north of Guadalajara, then up onto the barren plane south of Zacatecas. The drive was a blur because Lou really hauled ass & we only stopped a couple of times — once at the ruins at La Quemada, though it turns out we only saw a very small portion of the ruins. I need to go back there.

We stopped agin for gas outside of Zacatecas & Jeri & I grabbed roadside tacos from a little stand across the highway from the Pemex, & Lou freaked out when he saw what we were eating. “That could be horse, it could be dog, you have no idea what they’re cooking over there!” We shrugged our shoulders since we were halfway done. They were good tacos.

When we got back to Texas, we sifted through the remains of the burnt-out shop, pulled out the steel parts of our 5 color manual press (the aluminum bits had all melted — man, I wish I had pictures) & strapped them to an open U-haul trailer. After talking to the manufacturer in Florida, they determined they could refurbish the press for les than the cost of a new one, so Kevin and I got in a rent car and hauled the thing to somewhere near Orlando, on what I recall being a real death-march of a trip. We shared driving & drove straight through both ways, surviving a front-wheel blowout somewhere in Western Louisiana.

After we got the press back a few weeks later, we set it up in our one-car garage, got out the supplies from Mexico & set about starting over, as one does.

This is the only known picture of me printing in the garage on Lawton. Circa 1985.

Pulled the old Mexican screen out of my attic yesterday & dug through the t-shirt archives. The screen features Danny Garrett’s Antone’s Little Walter design – a classic icon of Austin T-shirt design. The shirt in the gallery was definitely printed with this actual screen. The print went through a lot of iterations, but this was the first. Danny is a detail sort of guy. He took his inspiration from American money, thus the filigree swirls & the lovely engraving look to LW’s portrait. This is all done pen & ink on hardboard — I have held the original in my hand, & you can see a few light pencil guidelines on it, but this was just simply hand drawn by a master. I pretty much had to immediately get good at screen making & printing, having high-quality customers like Danny & Antone’s.