Jonas Wood interviewed by master printer Jacob Samuel, from "Nonstop: Jonas Wood Speaks
with Jacob Samuel", Art in Print, vol. 8, no. 1, 2018

I’ve also started to collect prints and look at prints, and see how other people have made
prints—I just got this Lichtenstein print, a brushstroke one. And when I started examining it,
I discovered how amazing it was that he could translate his work so directly into printmaking.
So yes, it really opens up—a few years after we started I realized that drawing had always
informed my painting; then I saw how collage had informed it. But once printmaking entered
the equation, that also started informing my painting and vice versa. Even when thinking
about the process of making a painting, I started taking cues from printmaking and putting
them back into paintings.

JW Collaborating with Jean Milant at Cirrus in 2009 was my
real first experience making a set of editions with a print house. I had been
in a three-person show at his gallery in 2006. I didn’t know much about him
then, but I went to his gallery and realized that he had made all of this amazing
stuff with artists I love, like Ed Ruscha and Baldessari and…
JS Joe Goode…
JW Chris Burden…
JS To me, Jean Milant is the great unsung hero of Los Angeles printmaking.
He doesn’t get the credit he deserves.
JW We printed all the birds and the birdcages and then I hand-drew all of the
details of the birds on each one. That was 2011, and then in 2014 I merged a
collage concept with lithography to make cutout photos of landscape pots with
silkscreen plants “growing” out of them. I had never used photolithography, I’d
always used lithography for drawing (though in my first set with Jean, we used
the impression of wood grain to make a floor plane). We have made other
things since then. It’s like he said, “You can’t stop.”