The evolution of printmaking

By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

•

Honolulu Printmakers' 76th Annual Exhibition Academy Art Center at Linekona 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesdays through Saturdays 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays Through April 11 Free 536-5507 2 p.m. today. Doris Duke Theatre, Honolulu Academy of Arts. Free. A panel of arts professionals will discuss the topic Prints: Art or Reproduction? with emphasis on the implications of digital reproduction. Is there a difference? What is the role of digital prints, the latest art form in the print world? The moderator is David C. Farmer, actor/director, attorney and Advertiser guest art reviewer. Panelists include digital artist Mark Ammen; artist, writer and professor of art Marcia Morse; author, artist, and educator Duane Preble; and Michael Rooks, co-curator of the Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Bank. 7 p.m. Wednesday. Community Room, Academy Art Center at Linekona Free. A panel of arts professionals will discuss "Appropriation: Mining Visual Resources," or, what's yours is mine? What are the responsibilities of print artists using appropriated visual materials? What is appropriation in the print world? The moderator is intellectual-property attorney Tony Clapes. Panelists include University of Hawai'i certified archivist Ellen Chapman; artist and gallery owner Pegge Hopper; and graphic designer; print artist, children's book illustrator and publisher Hans Loffel.

Stop by the Honolulu Printmakers' 76th Annual Exhibition at the Academy Art Center at Linekona, and you'll get a good idea of what's going on.

Sensitively juried and expertly designed by the visiting Dutch artist Toon Wegner, this exhibition merits close attention for the variety and quality of the work displayed and the excellence of the exhibition design.

Printmakers have for some time been exploring the expanded possibilities of the medium, and this exhibition evidences the exploration continues apace.

Laura Smith's "Wedding Gift Box" and "Paper Community" — executed in the techniques of woodcut, relief collagraph, stencil and monoprint — demonstrate the surprise and creative possibilities of printmaking that escapes the confines of gallery walls.

Similarly, in the hands-on booklet created by photogravure on copper — "Photogravure Abstracted" — numerous artists, including James Rumford, Susyn Fritz, Christine Harris-Amos, Keiko Hori, Dodie Warren, Deborah Nehmad, Dick Adair, Hoppy Smith, Helene Sroat, Joseph Singer and Marcia Morse, have collaborated to create an inventive and tactile experience that is a refreshing break from the majority of the pieces that are trapped out of touch behind glass.

Han Solo shows works using inkjet printing and monotype chine colle techniques.

Inkjet printing is just one of the many newer technologies that have generated heated controversy in the arts and collector communities about the role of new reproductive technologies in the service of art.

As part of this exhibition, the Printmakers group is offering free panel discussions (see box) to explore the borders of art and reproduction and the limits to appropriation of visual resources.

Chine colle is a kind of collage technique used in intaglio printing in which a usually thinner piece of paper is attached to a heavier sheet and printed simultaneously. With a very thin coat of glue on the back, the thin paper is positioned face down on the plate, the heavier paper then placed on top and the pile run through the press.

The mere description of this technique suggests the dual fascination that possesses many printmakers: the alchemy of process wedded to a yearning to express the ineffable.

Han Solo's work — as in his "Puka aui" — is graced by a bold graphic design sense, with delicate, rich blacks, a shock of red, a touch of tan, all suggestive of a delicate air-brush application.

His work is both abstract as well as cityscape-specific.

He sees vibrantly through slits of vision, as in "Inclusions 19," his monotype collage wisely purchased by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

Photogravure is an intaglio plate-making process in which an image is photo mechanically transferred from the plate onto an intermediary, such as a roller, and then onto paper, resulting in a printed image that is not reversed.

"Ulu Niu" — Hoppy Smith's photogravure with chine colle print — suggests a Hawai'i of more than a century ago with its sepia, monochrome images of coconut palms.

Jeera Rattanangkoon's woodcut "Koa" uses traditional methods and imagery to create a playfully pastel tree immersed in water and stretching to the heavens, the power of the uniquely Hawaiian sense of place and traditional symbols reinterpreted with a contemporary sensibility.

A collagraph is a print made from a specially constructed plate that has been produced like a collage, resulting in high and low surfaces that hold ink differently during printing.

Deborah Nehmad's exquisite and intriguing "openbook (ii)," best described as a pyrographic collagraph, consists of a burned template of cutout x's alongside a pattern that was apparently produced by an application of heat and flame on the template.

The work's delicacy, scale, and subtlety invoke the best of Paul Klee's works.

Judith Nelson's poetic "Furrowed Beauty" and "Paring Nap" — red dirt pod prints with stems and fronds on handmade paper — glow with tapa-like colors and designs, rendered in a fresh and inventive three-dimensional design.

Similarly inspired is Phillip Markwart's "He wai kau I ka lewa: He niu II," a hand-stamped kapa design ('ohe kapala) from hand-carved bamboo stamps and screen-printed watermark on wauke paper.

Jennifer Callejo achieves a kind of black humor in her in-your-face etching/lithograph/screen print "Faker."

Etching is an intaglio technique in which acid is used to incise lines into a metal plate and includes aquatint, lift grounds, soft ground, hard ground, and the like.

Consisting mostly of images of dead blackbirds, Callejo's piece is an ironic commentary on the Beatles' slightly saccharine song of the same name, its lyrics and artist's commentary impressed on flat balsa wood squares: "Blackbird singing in the dead of night/Take these broken wings and learn to fly/All your life/You were only waiting for this moment to arise."

"From Mo'ili'ili Mauka" displays Laura Ruby's wonderful craftsmanship at the service of her subtle sense of humor and plain fun: a faux-traditional Chinese landscape painting magically rendered in a mixed-media print.

"Sin" and "Nature" — Yukiko Certeza's color lithographic nudes, semi-nudes and military images with chine colle of platinum/palladium prints — are at the same time seductive and disturbing.

The prints have a kind of raw power and attraction that convey a disturbing sense of autobiographical confessional sexual guilt and shame, confronted, grappled with, and perhaps exorcised.

The exhibition is nicely balanced between intimate, small-scale pieces and larger monumental works.

Jared Wickware's tiny, extremely skillful "Dance on Terror," a burin engraving on copper, is a miniature masterwork of this all-but-vanished medium that by the end of the fifteenth century had attained its highest level of artistic and technical expertise with the work of artists such as Albrecht DArer, Lucas van Leyden and Andrea Mantegna.

Wickware offers a soothing message for today's world: softly rounded lines delineate joyful dancers entwined yet not trapped by some impalpable, undefined mesh of terror that may persist but can never vanquish.

David Smith's lithograph with gold leaf, "A Threat Unspecified" mines the same territory, only in an heroic scale that is a worthy exemplar of the best of graphic illustration.

Below a resplendent yet menacing gold zodiac and black male dancer with horns, a figure strains to emerge out of the hellish fire and long darkness of endurance.

Wegner's exhibition design is excellent, showing off the many varied works in a way that leads the viewer's attention in a fully controlled designed fashion.

For example, one wall of monochromatic prints — intaglios, monoprints and lithographs — done by such diverse artists as Maile Yawata and Paul Weissman, almost looks as though the pieces were created to co-exist.

David C. Farmer wrote The Advertiser's Sunday art column from 1975 to 1976. He holds a BFA in painting and drawing and a master's degree in Asian and Pacific art history.