M-C Press and Press Type
History
In the early 1960s, Paul acquired a small Chandler and Price printing press. On it he produced booklets, cards and event announcements that often included inked leaf prints, body prints, collage, poetry and photography. This ephemera was self-published under the name ‘M-C Press’, referring to the press location at Paul’s property on Mill Creek Road in Healdsburg, California.
Detail from ‘Curve book’, M-C Press, 1964
‘Game for Angels’ deck of poetry cards by Paul Beattie and George Herms, 1963
In 1963, he and fellow artist George Herms collaborated on 50 decks of poetry cards titled ‘Game for Angels’. Each deck of 32 cards came in a hand-sewn drawstring bag. Paul gifted decks of these poetry cards to friends including Wallace Berman, Jess, Dean Stockwell, and the poets Ruth Weiss and Michael McClure.
The Centre Pompidou in Paris featured three M-C Press pieces in their 2016 exhibition titled ‘Beat Generation: New York San Francisco Paris’. Included were ‘Game for Angels’, ‘Hand print with Z’ and ‘Curve Book’, as well as two of Paul’s 1960s black-and-white films.
‘Hand with Z’, collaged hand print by Paul Beattie, 1963-64, displayed in Beat Generation: New York San Francisco Paris, Centre Pompidou Museum, Paris, France
Green River, 1968, acrylic with mixed media on masonite, 14 x 15 3/4 inches, PM-79.1-RB
By the mid 1960s, Paul began to integrate the small printing press type into the flat pictorial surface of his paintings, and also extended their use into his sculptural works. He likened the use of these rectangular pieces of metal to: “Heavily laden short brushstrokes, small directional planes suspended in pictorial space, and segmented lines, creating a faceted, shallow bas-relief genre, and a potential similarity to analytical cubism.”