“Mc Carthy’s Truck” is one of my very first offset lithograph limited edition prints. Produced in 1981 in an edition of 500 these were sold one at a time to customers in our little business in rural Alaska, the Glennallen Tastee Freez.
We moved to Copper Center, Alaska, from San Diego, California, in 1975 where I immersed myself in painting and drawing life in the vast interior wilderness that later became the Wrangell/St. Elias National Park. I received numerous requests for drawings and paintings of historic locations in the region, and after completing a good many originals of these subjects, I grew bored. There simply was too much else to paint to confine myself to the same subjects over and over again. As a solution we decided to make prints of some of the most popular drawings and sell them at our family owned/operated fast food store on the Glenn Highway.
This decision led to a family project that took a lot of work and spare time for several years. The printing was done in Anchorage, a 230 mile trip on the Glenn Highway, a windy two lane road that followed the Matanuska River from the summit between two mountain ranges. A spectacular drive, but lengthy and often treacherous on glare ice, new snow or below zero temperatures. For packaging we ordered stacks of pre-cut chip board and boxes of plastic bags and were surprised how much space this inventory took in the house. This was during the pre-computer era, I typed information labels and re-typed the same information several times so there were eight labels on one sheet of paper. We duplicated the labels at the regional native office of Ahtna then hand cut each sheet to get eight. In the evening, after work, the family sat on the living room floor together stuffing plastic bags with signed print, chip board, label and scotch tape to close the bag.
Today we have so many conveniences; from my studio we can produce computer generated giclee prints, create labels and make copies, and shrink wrap for display. In the beginning my family made many sacrifices for my art career and to this day I am grateful and will never forget.
Gail Niebrugge, Alaska painter
