About
Hangar 18 is a website created by Nick Cernak documenting the day-to-day events that unfold at The Firehouse Kustom Rockart Company, home to Chuck Sperry & Ron Donovan. Process print threads, art events, and other random cosmic transmissions from outer space will be poping up here on a continuous basis so check back often and feel free to leave comments.
Exerpt from Art of Modern Rock about Firehouse:
FIREHOUSE, based in San Francisco, is a supremely renegade printshop, a partnership of two master screen printers, Chuck Sperry and Ron Donovan. Sperry is a hot-button cartoonist from the political ‘zine and post-Zap Comix tradition, while Donovan does wheelies on their computer.
CHUCK SPERRY: “Ron Donovan, my partner in Firehouse, and I travel to Europe all the time, and we see a resurgence of silkscreen printing there as well as here. There’re so many people involved with it now! I think it’s taken on a sort of magic quality, partially because it’s becoming demystified. When people first watch us silkscreen it seems very technical; there are a lot of chemicals involved, and procedures, and preparations, blah, blah, blah. But when you walk them through the process, they realize they can handle the basic elements fairly easily. You can’t immediately master the art form, but you can get a grip on it. It’s then you learn there are many steps you can take along the way to get better and better at it.
“What people like is that they’re really pushing ink around. It’s direct head-to-hands process. What you’re doing is coming right out of your hands. When I first encountered the computer I wished I could just reach into the monitor, grab stuff directly and move it around. In effect that’s what you get good at with a computer, but you never feel it exactly. In prepping materials for screen printing, and in the printing process itself, you feel everything. It’s like there is a physical dialog between the human will and the material you’re working with. It’s pushing and pulling. Wrestling, even.
