Contemporary Printmaking in the Northwest:
One artist's viewpoint

Author Lois Allan (Contemporary Art in the Northwest, Crafstman House) asked for a paragraph on prints I offered for her next book. This is the first draft at my first, second and third attempts. 1960 Words. 4 Pages. PS961004 ©1996 Bill H. Ritchie, Jr.

First try

I don't recall the first work of art, but I recall the first print that gave me a jolt. Now, thirty years later, it is still a rare experience to find a print--by someone else or resulting from my own effort--to which I have a physical reaction as well as emotional, intellectual or social response.

The Northwest is a land haunted by ghosts of aliens, or maybe a lost tribe of Native Americans. They left a kind of charged atmosphere that, with a few months' exposure, makes some printmakers see double, or triple and--sometimes--quadruple the purpose and meaning of their art and craft. Likened to a kind of intellectual fallout from the industries here--The Boeing Company, Microsoft and Aldus, for example--the socio-economics have made the region wealthy with prints and printmaking artists.

Not only for the print do we people labor in our printmaking. Some of our kind created companies devoted to printmaking supplies. Some invented new names for unusual ways to make prints. Generally speaking, all the Northwest printmakers balance research and application in their working, caring equally about process and result.

A friend recalled attending a demonstration during which the artist said, "I love lithography. It's too bad we have to think about the image, too." It's a land of lovers-of-process, it might be called "process-philomania." Not only printmakers are affected by it. Sculptors, dancers, musicians--evolution moves the creative artists.

Prints are special because they document the history of their evolution. They are special too because print is the ancestral root of all the new media, so every print shares a genetic particle of photography, film, digital media and even music. Processes and creations ripple backward and forward in time/space via the silicon and metal fibers of the new machines, too, producing illusions that it knows "truths" about prints and printmaking.

That print I saw in 1967 will be on-line someday and I can revisit it. Also, some day you may go to my home page and find the title and see for yourself. Nothing will replicate the original experience, of course, but these works in print--whether a book about Northwest Printmaking or one of those reproduced in these pages--resuscitate living experiences. This achievement by an artist is, as Robert Grudin said in his book, Time and the Art of Living, at its best the ultimate capture of energy.

No one print, and no one person, indeed, no one medium alone can ever capture the scope of creativity integral to people. For their part, printmakers play different roles in dissemination of spirit through a multiple of means and a multiplicity of times--and will continue to do so in their systematic, evolutionary way.

Another try

Why do I love printmaking? Why do I hate printmaking?

As an art form, no other is as entangled in the present and its culture. For example, prints and the states they go through leave a history of their own making. They are like people who keep journals and diaries, save their old driver's licenses, love letters and expired pass ports. My print, "Cancelled Artists Last Loveletter" took me back to my works from 1969.

Then, in spite of a hundred rules against it, I slit the print with a razor blade and inserted another artwork--I called the stampworks--into the drypoint picture of the hands. How can I do this and offer it to writer on the subject of print making? Isn't this breaking of a rule? The childishness is obvious, the rebellion against the rules of printmaking, the tempest in the teapot.

The truth is, I had in mind another use for that first trial proof: There was a nice, inviting empty space that said, "Write on me! Write on me!" and I had, for several days, been on the lookout for something from one of my manuscripts. I found one that was quite vicious, and of course I deferred. But in its mean-spirited way it asserted itself again and again.

"I dare you to write this vicious rant," it said. Well, an envelope may contain a loveletter or a hate letter. It seems to me prints die if they are too obedient, too predictable.

Later I was photographing my print, and it died. I don't know whether it was the strong light or what, but I felt them slipping away. If they could talk, it might have been like the bad witch in Wizard of Oz saying, "I'm melting, I'm melting...." The feeling was that as long as the prints were unique and could only be experienced as one-of-a-kind, in one place and never reproduced by any means, they lived a kind of unified, private life. The moment they were duplicated--either by the highly-skilled printer or by a camera, their uniqueness died.

The same would be true of a painting or a sculpture. The replication of some aspect of it, such as you have in a reproduction, takes away its aura of uniqueness and reduces its life by so much. It makes it vulnerable to misrepresentation, like being taken out of context.

But I was happy to go on and photograph all twenty five of the proofs, plus the three or four new ones of the subsequent work. Then I started in on the plaster prints and that is when I ran out of film.

One last try

I took an interesting drive last night to an "Open Press"--one of those events where you pay a few dollars for a couple hours' access to a wonderful intaglio press. That is the kind of press on which you can print almost anything--etchings, engravings, drypoints or, on the painterly side, monotypes and monoprints. The evening was a great success, as these events usually are and partly it was a success for me because it gave me another chance to fly some ideas around a room full of people who on the one hand had a common interest (the press) but each of whom were concentrating on their own thing.

I was talking to one of the others and he mentioned Iris printing, and we agreed that this was a printing technique that really was undervalued in the fine arts in our region of the country. We also agreed that in all probability it would be difficult to "sell" in the so-called fine arts because its technology is so deep that it frightens people away. A lot of extraneous issues come into the process, which we, again agreeably, decided to call "baggage." This refers to baggage we learn in schools and universities about the fine art of print making.

Later I was going through some of this "baggage" on my own, having an inner dialog with my past, you might say. I met artists over the last thirty years of "packing my bags" who represented the innovators of print making. I owe them a lot for the things they taught me to do--and what not to do, too. This gives me an idea for one last chance to say something useful for Lois' forthcoming book. I will call it the new myth of inventing in contemporary print making.

First I realized that some of the people who taught me things were focused on the materials of printmaking and the techniques for handling them. First, the dead heroes of ancient times such as the prehistoric, anonymous cave-painters who used their hands to stencil and palm-print parts of their wall paintings. Then there were the anonymous crafts people and artisans who invented relief, intaglio, planographic and photographic printing.

The circle comes complete with the invention of the "fine" part of fine art printmaking, which is in essence the refined "intent" that the print is not market and commerce driven but, rather, driven by expression, emotion and esthetics. Somewhere in this mixture is the elusive thing we call "creativity," too and poetics. These are of an intangible nature, but their tracks are certainly clear when we experience them in the works of art.

Printed works of art depend on the plate-making and printing processes, and here is the foundation of the old myth of print making invention. In recent years my teachers in this were Glen Alps, Stanley Hayter, Rolf Nesch and numerous others. I remember Rolf telling me, "Yes, I knew Stanley Hayter. Back in the 'thirties we were both inventing prints." For years I wondered what he meant by "inventing prints" since printing had been around for thousands of years.

I guess he meant he and Hayter were re-inventing print making, but the word reinventing was not in vogue at the time. Besides, Rolf's knowledge of English was almost as sketchy as my knowledge of Norwegian. I left it at that, but last night it came to me that I, too, had been thinking along the lines of inventing print making although not with the gusto that Rolf, Hayter and Alps did. These artists--my teachers--went about the project with a passion.

They saw the invention as being in the way a plate was made, the way the metal was either extremely deeply-bitten with acids, built up with wires or screens, or how to replace the metal altogether. Hayter wrote "New Ways of Gravure," which suggested the old burin-in-the-metal was acceptable, but the lines should follow parallels in music, and not the superficial visual world of surface appearances. It all came down to the materials.

That was then. More than fifty years later, when it seems like all the printmaking techniques have been tried out, it is time for a new kind of print. Iris--one of the best ways to print computer or scanned images--is only one more printmaking technique where the material of the print and its process are the definer and the foundation for discussions like the one I had with my friend last night.

My invention, "Living Prints" was at first merely a name to use as a registered trademark for electronically-managed databases about print making. After working with it for several years I realized it is a new kind of print. I think of it as the new kind of print the world needs now because it is not merely another kind of process or material combination. In fact, it is the element that drew me to the art of my teachers in the first place: pure energy. This energy is like life itself to me, and that is one reason I call my art "Living Prints."

These are the times when a new kind of art experience is opening up, one that stands beside the art gallery and museum the way a concert hall stands beside a CD recording or a reproduction of an artwork. While the original work of art, the unique painting or sculpture, or the live performance by musicians or dancers is one experience, the making and re-making of prints is a new one. It is new over and over. We play at print making the way musicians play together or alone on their instruments, enjoying the process or laboring over it.

Living Prints, the new way of printmaking is almost like a game. I invented a name to go with it, which is Emeralda. That is a story I will defer for another opportunity. This will conclude my third and last try at a contribution for Lois' forthcoming book.