What did you do during the pandemic? Did you pick up a new language, do some renovations, or something else?
Graham Necyk did something else, that’s for certain. He set up his printer in the basement. But wait, this isn’t one of your run-of-the-mill printers that sits collecting dust on the shelf next to your desktop.
It’s a 112-cm Canon Pro 4000 large format graphic arts printer with 11 archival ink cartridges for superior clarity, resolution and colour accuracy. Okay, the 'beast' was bought by his big brother Brad Necyk who might be familiar to many Gazette readers as a prolific ‘intermedia’ visual artist. While the elder is moving toward putting out a book of meditative photography next year, the younger is picking up a side career as publisher.
“It was kind of funny timing because I had been working on a business plan, wanting to do this and get really more into it and going on my own offering some printing stuff. Obviously I focus a lot on Brad's stuff because he does a lot on the creative side and the printings can be time-consuming at times,” Graham explained.
“It’s something I was really interested in so now I have the printer," he continued. "The prints last a phenomenal amount of time. They're coming out really pretty much the highest quality you can ask for."
The 34-year-old St. Albert High grad is not a stranger to the graphic world. His first foray in post-secondary education was the Marketing program at NAIT, which led to more of the same at the University of Lethbridge. He lucked out – his words – with his first job in the real world: a bona fide marketing role where he was involved in a wide range of activities from running trade shows to publishing literature and making advertisements.
When you're the kind of guy who has been in the biz for years and knows his way around photo editing and pro print jobs, perhaps being a 'capital-P' Printer is the most logical step up.
There's only one problem: coming up with a name for his new company. Umm ... how about being inspired by the computer lingo for when you upload a lot of images from your camera?
"You end up with a large icon archive of prints that maybe the last thing you're thinking about is how to name the files. It just became Untitled Media Printing."
Visit his website at untitledmediaprinting.com and you'll get a better sense of the variety of work that he can develop for your personal or professional project, including frameless mounting. There's a decent selection of paper stocks to choose from, and options for metallic photo lustre, Somerset velvet watercolour paper, and enhanced adhesive synthetic paper. Special papers and other media are options too.
On the Collections tab on his site, you can even get an early look at Brad Necyk's Meditation photos. Graham intends to work more and more with select artists to offer curated online galleries for public viewing.
He's already had some interest from local artists looking for gallery-quality prints for different shows that they're working toward for the spring.
