Untitled II by Timothy App, 1999 Etching
White Cloud, Brown Sky, by Mark Strand, 1999 Monoprint	Untitled etching by Jae Ko, 1999

Since World War II, printmaking in America has undergone a revolution, changing its focus from a craft practiced by academic specialists to an important medium for painters, which in turn has affected their pictorial output. During the Renaissance, the first artists to become famous as printmakers were painters like Pollaiolo and Durer. Outstanding draftsman, they were quick to invent techniques to turn their unique drawing style into multiple graphics that could spread their ideas across Europe. But once the “painterly” style, which exalted color over line, became dominant in the seventeenth century, fine artists usually turned over the task of translating their images into prints to technicians who were essentially craftsman and not creative artists.

This situation changed when Rembrandt and Goya began putting as much energy and invention into their prints as they did into their paintings. In doing so, they ushered in the modern period of printmaking. During the twentieth century, the greatest masters of twentieth century European painting were also printmakers, working directly on the stone and plate, revising as they proceeded. Generally this was not the case in the United States, however, where printmaking skills became an end in themselves and its practitioners, who were often also university art school teachers or illustrators, concentrated on perfecting the technical qualities of the medium rather than on creating original themes, images and compositions.

The Abstract Expressionists were not known as printmakers, perhaps because their painterly style did not translate well into a graphic medium. Newman and Motherwell eventually made outstanding contributions. Outside of a few screenprints published posthumously, Pollock made only one set of prints - a series of etchings done when he worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17 in New York in 1947, where he also met Miro. It is, I believe, more than coincidental that Pollock began painting on the floor as opposed to the wall that same year. The experience of working down on the plate as well as the process of intaglio both inspired developments in his painting that proved crucial. The successive states of a print have the same relationship to one another as Pollock’s superimposed skeins in his poured or “drip” paintings and the line that is eaten away by the acid suggests a different role for drawing than depiction.

A new era in American printmaking was ushered in by artist June Wayne, who founded the Tamarind Workshop to train master printers to collaborate with painters in the European tradition. She prepared the way for the revolution in the medium that her own star pupil, Ken Tyler, and a determined Russian émigré, Tatyana Grosman, would bring about in the Sixties when they taught great American artists with little or no previous training in the medium how to make prints. Most of the major American artists of the Sixties worked either at Grosman’s Universal Limited Art Editions or with Tyler at Gemini, GEL and later at his own Tyler Graphics.

Grosman’s original idea was to produce the livre de luxe, or the artist’s book that the great European painters like Picasso, Matisse and Miro had brought to such great heights. Her first projects were collaborations between painters and poets, such as Larry Rivers and Frank O’Hara and Robert Rauschenberg and Yevtushenko. Grosman’s prints were known for their great sensitivity and nuance. Tyler, on the other hand, concentrated on finding novel means for painters to translate their images into large-scale prints, which often meant inventing new machines and techniques.

With the example of these pioneers, others like Martha Macks, founder of Goya-Girl Press in Baltimore, MD, have started other workshops dedicated equally to high quality graphics and to original images. When painters turn to printmaking, their attitudes are different from those of technicians or craftsman. They tend to use graphics as a laboratory for new discoveries that may later find their way back into their paintings. They are more interested in the expressiveness of the medium than in its purity, and frequently use both tools and processes in an unorthodox manner.

By the time Rauschenberg, Johns, Stella and Warhol began making prints in the Sixties, the symbiosis between painting and printmaking begun by Picasso had become even more total. In other words, they were learning things from their prints that could be used to develop their paintings further, either stylistically or technically. In Warhol’s case, his paintings were simply silk-screens on canvas. In the case of Johns, who incorporates images transferred from his prints into his paintings and vice versa through photography, the two media fed off one another, creating greater richness in both. Some of the painters chosen to create prints for Goya-Girl Press, such as Power Boothe and Don Kimes, are inspired by the possibility of hybridizing new forms through symbiosis. Others use the occasion to find ways of translating their canvas images to paper.

Power Boothe uses printmaking as a way of image creation in itself, experimenting with technical processes such as solarization to create images that echo the painterly blur that activates the surfaces of his paintings. By creating monotypes, i.e. unique prints, he works in the rarified area pioneered by Degas that contradicts the multiplicity of reproduction. Like Boothe, Kimes has begun to use photographic processes as an intermediary step that provides a bridge between painting and printmaking. Departing from a collage on canvas technique that he had mastered, he began using metal rather than canvas as a support and using acid to eat away an image in the manner that etchings are produced.

Both Boothe and Kimes create effects that are both painterly and spontaneous in prints through the use of experimental processes that can be controlled only up to a point and permit for alteration through accident. Their imagery coincidentally suggests natural phenomena - winds and weather in the case of Boothe and geological strata or cloud forms in Kimes’ works. The metaphoric basis is poetic, although the imagery remains abstract. Other artists use imagery more specifically or with narrative intent. Martha Macks emphasizes the palimpsest effect of printing that conserves the pentimenti of previous states, translating what she learns in prints to her paintings that are personal fantasies involving recognizable imagery.

Works by the group of six artists in this show [Painters Who Make Prints, 1997] range in style from entirely abstract to totally representational. Karl Connolly and Timothy App represent the purer forms of representation and abstraction. Connolly’s post-modernist myth-inspired fantasies introduce alien elements into familiar subjects, emphasizing the capacity of reproduction to encourage hybridization and iconographical overlap. Timothy App’s severe, architectonic geometric constructions, on the other hand, are firmly based within the latest developments of the modernist tradition of non-objective painting. Jae Ko translates her intriguing ovoid and circular images created by covering rolls of adding machine tape with sumi ink into mysterious halating forms etched on plate through a solar process that adds mystery and unfamiliarity.

Goya Girl Press is currently publishing new works by Joyce J. Scott, Mark Strand, Power Boothe, Louisa Chase, Debra Rubino, David Hess, Allyn Massey. For more information please call Goya-Girl Press at 410-366-2001 or visit us on the web at www.goyagirl.com.

Goya-Girl press will be at the Contemporary Print fair at the Baltimore Museum of Art Sunday March 26, 2000, Booth 20.