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Related links: For more information about printmaking, visit Ohio University's School of Art on the Web at www.ohio.edu/art.  return to top
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artist:
Art Werger, 2001
Continuum
(Detail)
Mezzotint. Entire piece contains 36 plates, each measuring 4 x 4 inches. return to top return to top click to enlarge
artist:
Mary Manusos, 1991 Yellow and Red
Etching on handmade paper, 32 x 16 inches. click to enlarge
artist:
Mary Manusos, 2002
Blooms
Etching on handmade paper, 46 x 34 inches. click to enlarge
artist:
Benjy Davies, 1999
6th Quarter
(Kosovo)
Lithograph/
screenprint, 22 x 30 inches. click to enlarge
artist:
Benjy Davies, 2001
Daddy Feet
Lithograph, 7 x 5 inches. return to top return to top return to top return to top | | Art Under Pressure
Those immersed in the age-old pursuit of printmaking — painstaking, precise, and, finally, sublime — know that it's work that doesn't let the artist off easy.
by Andrea Gibson Here's what a true print is not: the reproductions of Monet's water lilies or Van Gogh's Starry Night, stamped out by machine by the thousands and even millions, sold in the frame store at the shopping mall. And don't even count the "limited edition" series of 50,000 prints of a trendy painter's splashings that sell for $500 a pop.
Printmaker Bob Lazuka shudders to think.
"Those should sell for $15 like a poster you'd buy at a novelty shop," he says.
A real print, he explains, is an impression of the original mark an artist makes on stone, metal, silk, or even plastic, born onto 100 percent cotton paper after squeezing through a few thousand pounds of pressure per square inch on a formidable printing press. And, of course, reproduced by hand to build a series of 50, 100, or 150 identical images, signed by the artist and sold to galleries and the general public. An art aficionado in Green Bay, Wisconsin, could have the same original piece of artwork hanging on her wall that a printmaking enthusiast in Finland owns. These are prints. The posters that cause Lazuka to shudder are reprints.
Sharing a work of art in multiple is especially satisfying for printmakers, considering the arduous process they often go through to make it. Take artist Art Werger. He's enthralled by intaglio, a form of printmaking that requires him to painstakingly etch detailed drawings onto copper plates, using a 6-inch-long metal tool and acid, before rolling them through the press several times in different colored inks. Each time the paper emerges from the press, the image whispers a bit louder with life. It's a process that produces a new series of prints every two months to one year.
It sounds like hard work because it is. And that's what printmakers like about it.
"It takes a certain kind of individual to be a printmaker," says Lazuka, an associate professor of printmaking and director of Ohio University's School of Art. "It's not just a discipline but a kind of madness. You need to be a little obsessive about things."
But ask any of the artists with the university's printmaking unit - which is considered by professional printmakers to be one of the premier programs in the nation - and they'll agree that the process of creating a print is worth the effort. Many artists throughout history would vouch for that.
First Impressions
Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein made it hip in the 1960s. Pablo Picasso tried it thousands of times. So did Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas, and a number of other big names in the art world. They were skilled printmakers, following a creative tradition that began thousands of years before they were born.
Experts trace the roots of printmaking to the Sumerians, circa 3000 B.C., who first cooked up the idea of rolling stones over soft clay to make multiple impressions of an image. More than 3,000 years later, the Japanese and Chinese were rubbing paper against wood blocks, and the Egyptians followed up a few hundred years after that by printing images on textiles.
Like a lot of things, printmaking in the 21st century has adopted a certain technological edge, and it's not uncommon to find artisans using computers, printers, and photography to craft their work. But many printmakers, including the ones at Ohio University, still use such classic techniques as lithography, in which a grease pencil is rubbed over a coffee table-sized slab of limestone, and engraving, in which the artist uses a sharp tool to carve images in metal. Paper is pressed over the stone or metal plate to produce the print.
"Whether (printmaking) is an expanding field or shrinking field depends on how you define it," says Sergio Soave, a past president of the Southern Graphics Council, a nonprofit professional printmakers organization. "There's a strong tradition and there are many universities and communities in the country where very traditional printmaking is thriving. There are other communities that have decided to change the definition to include digital media."
Ask Soave, a professor of art in printmaking at West Virginia University, and he describes printmaking as a vehicle for creative communication - specifically, art that is affordable, portable, multiple, and democratic. Lazuka agrees with the broad definition, favoring a colleague's remark that a print is simply "a mark made by pressure."
Taking a peek at the portfolios of some of Ohio University's artists, it's clear that this open-ended description of the genre suits their work. While these artisans share some similarities in process, philosophy, and final product, their individual approaches illustrate the wide range of work being created in the field of printmaking.
Heavy Metal, Soft Paper
Wood and copper. Linoleum and silk. Stone and plastic. If it's solid and stable, an artist can make a print from it.
Werger, a professor of printmaking at Ohio University and a nationally renowned intaglio artist, uses one of the more meticulous processes. Intaglio requires the exact opposite approach to a conventional painting or drawing: Instead of adding an image onto a blank canvas or sheet of paper with paint or pencil, the artist scratches away at the surface of the metal plate with a tool - a process of subtraction. When the artist wipes ink over the plate, it sinks into the grooves. The deepest marks produce the boldest or darkest colors, while the untouched surface of the metal will print white on paper.
Intaglio has allowed Werger to create several stunning series of prints. Swimmers, a sequence of 10 individual images created between 1998 and 2000, shows mostly girls and women clad in bright swimsuits from an underwater vantage point. The colors are bold and tropical and the shimmer of sunlight in the water is almost photographic.
But Werger also has used a related process, called mezzotint, to produce a series of small, finely detailed black and white images that have a moody, film noir quality. For one month last year, while laid up from knee surgery, Werger etched city scenes on 36 individual napkin-sized copper plates. Each day, his wife would crank the plate through his home printing press, producing a paper sample of his progress on the image. When the etchings were complete, Werger printed them in a grid on a large sheet of paper and called the piece Continuum. The images, which were completed the day before the September 11 terrorist attacks, seem foreboding in retrospect, tense with urban alienation.
Mezzotint is precise: It requires a deftness with sharp tools and metal to create an image that rivals the nuances of a drawing or painting. And Werger typically runs the plate through the press several times, testing how clearly the image is reproducing on paper.
He lays a copper plate with an image of a Fed Ex truck in progress on the printing press, a 4-foot-long platform with a metal roller in the center. He layers a damp piece of paper over the plate, as well as a soft blanket. Turning a silver wheel on the side of the machine, the plate moves under the pressure of the heavy roller. When it emerges on the other side a few moments later, Werger peels back the layers to reveal the image.
"That's just about done," he says. "It has that punch, that richness of tone I'm looking for."
For Werger, it's that luscious quality of the intaglio print that transcends other styles of art - including other types of printmaking. But the absorbing process of developing these detailed works, though lengthy, also is part of the attraction, says the artist, whose work is in the collections of such venues as the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"It's sort of an anarchistic way of working, but I love every aspect of it," he says. "I'm able to craft something I'm completely in control of, and there's something very appealing about that."
Mary Manusos, a professor and chair of the printmaking department, also uses metal etching to create the plates for her prints and, like Werger, seeks a certain richness of color and tone in her work. But her methods and final pieces suggest that two artists can approach the same technique quite differently.
One of the most striking aspects of Manusos's artistry is her use of handmade paper. In her home studio, she transforms pulp into sheaths of paper of multiple blocks of color. The thick, textured handmade paper introduces an emotional element to the work. "I wanted images that looked watery, soft in the same way that I perceived memory," says the artist, who has shown her work in more than 250 exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
While creating the paper, Manusos also is etching an image onto a metal plate that she will ink and press onto the colored paper. The etching provides sharp definition and contrast to the abstract color blocks, and the final pieces are vivid, evocative. During the 1980s, Manusos used this method to create a series of prints inspired by the architecture of Latin America; she had worked in Mexico for a year and later took students on expeditions to the Yucatan for artistic inspiration. The layers of color, paper, and ink in these pieces complement the layers of cultural history that Manusos wanted to capture.
"I was fascinated by that because I grew up in San Diego and all the growth (in California) was very new - everything seemed the same," she says.
Manusos also prefers a spirited, spontaneous artistic process - she works fast, drawing from images and ideas in her head. For a series of 110 flower images she recently completed, the creation of the plates and paper took 10 days. Unlike some artisans, who make a series of identical prints, each of Manusos's wilting flower blooms is a variation on a theme, due to the random placement of color swatches in the handmade paper. Though the etching of the bloom remains static, each print has a fresh, individual feel to it.
If a print isn't gutsy, provocative, or quirky, Manusos argues, it isn't right.
Stones, Sons, and the Element of Surprise
Quirky is a word that also comes to mind when viewing the prints of Benjy Davies, a visiting instructor of printmaking at Ohio University. His whimsical work, which explores issues of fatherhood, includes realistic drawings of the artist, his two toddler sons, and common household objects, paired with childlike doodlings of dinosaurs, animals, and airplanes. In Story Time, Davies reads his son a bedtime story while fantastic creatures dance through the margins.
Raising children is kind of like printmaking, muses the artist, who became a father for the third time this summer. They both involve an element of surprise. Though you may have the basic concepts down, prints, like kids, can still offer something unexpected. But that's what keeps it interesting.
"It's never what you think it's going to be," Davies says about his work.
While printmakers do control several aspects of the creative process, there is plenty of room for chance in many of the styles of printmaking, including Davies's specialty, lithography. The artist uses a grease pencil to draw an image directly onto a 2-by-1-foot slab of limestone. He must render the image in reverse, as the printing process will create a mirror image of whatever he draws. After sponging the surface of the stone with water, he smooths a roller covered with greasy ink over the wet slab. The water repels the ink from sticking to any area other than the drawn image. The artist lays a piece of paper atop the stone, which is then pushed through the press to create an impression. He inks the stone with several different colors, which may mix in unusual ways.
For Davies, the process to create a single color print can take several days. The final piece peeled from the press may draw a gasp of wonder from the artist, who has been laboring in a state of anticipation.
"That's part of the appeal of printmaking - the anticipation and the payoff," Davies says. "Of course, there's also heartbreak when it doesn't work."
When it doesn't work, the artist can wipe the stone clean, start again. Davies and his lithography students have plenty of materials to work with in the Seigfred Hall studio, he says, gesturing to a wall of cubby holes, each holding a slab of limestone. Ohio University has one of the largest collections of lithography stones in the country - about 200 - and four printing presses for students and faculty to use, he says.
Though lithography was once a common commercial printmaking technique in the days before Kinko's, lithography businesses today have abandoned the stones in favor of aluminum plates, which are printed by machines. Artists and universities that teach lithography as a fine art form were quick to acquire the stones and presses when those commercial outfits made the switch. The large stones, which weigh between 100 and 200 pounds, speak to the physicality of the work. Printmaking is not always a solo art form; it's not uncommon for an artist to use a press assistant to carry out the physical work of cranking a stone, metal plate, or other source through the printing press.
These heavy stones can produce startlingly crisp images. Black tones are rich and white areas of the paper are clean. The printmaking technique also gives the image a depth that a straightforward drawing couldn't produce, Davies says. The intensity of the image is owed to the fact that lithographs, like other forms of prints, contain layers upon layers of ink and information.
Because each print exists in a series of multiples, often 25 to 100, Davies can show the same original piece of artwork in more than one gallery, and sell or trade it to more than one art enthusiast. His work has been included in more than 75 national and international exhibits and is represented in several public collections, such as those at Ohio State University and the city of Vaasa, Finland. And, of course, he always gets to keep one for himself.
"If I make something precious, I wouldn't want to get rid of it," he says.
Art for Sale
Because an original print exists in multiple, it's also an affordable piece of art. A print typically sells for $100 to $500, but paintings can go for thousands of dollars, Lazuka says.
But while this makes original prints accessible to art lovers who don't have Swiss bank accounts, such prices can deter art galleries from acquiring prints, as they can make bigger sales off a painting, he says. To complicate matters, some gallery owners either don't know the difference between an original print and a photomechanical reproduction of an art work or purposely take advantage of the public's confusion over the difference. And so some galleries peddle posters as original prints, says Lazuka, who, incidentally, uses a special form of printmaking called monotype that doesn't produce multiples.
For printmakers, landing their work on the walls of museums and galleries is only one avenue to success, says Soave of West Virginia University. The artists capitalize on the multiple nature of their genre to distribute prints through other means. Some use mechanisms such as postcards, zines (a handmade, noncommercial magazine), and the Internet to place their artwork directly in the hands of their audiences.
"In some ways, it's very liberating to work outside the structure that's available, such as museums," Soave says.
Galleries devoted entirely to printmaking, located in major cities such as New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago, support the art, however, and a vibrant community of a few hundred printmakers across the country keeps the practice alive through the trade of prints and the development of print collections. Ohio University printmakers are building a portfolio of work by noted artists called the Trisolini Print Collection, and the university's Kennedy Museum of Art also has an extensive trove of 1,700 contemporary prints that it displays to the public regularly.
Of course, the printmakers adhere to their form of art for art's sake. They've tried the rest - photography, painting, drawing - but are committed to the print.
Says Davies: "It's a lifelong passion."
For more information about printmaking, e-mail Bob Lazuka at laznka@ohio.edu. |
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