Art of the printer
Rogue Gallery showing honors works by the Pinkham Press By BILL VARBLE Take an artist, any artist. Add a master printer. What you get is something that's more than the sum of its parts: an original print. Linda Pinkham says that's because the printmaker enables the other artist to use a new medium, creating something that neither could have done alone.An exhibit opening today at the Rogue Gallery in Medford showcases instances of such collaborations over the past decade in Southern Oregon. Called "Ten Years, 37 Artists and One Master Printer," the retrospective brings together some 80 works by many of Southern Oregon's best-known artists working in collaboration with Pinkham, who is a master printer.A reception is planned for 7 p.m. Jan. 14 at the gallery, with an art talk by Linda Pinkham at 6 p.m. The exhibit runs through February. Pinkham and her husband, Dan, run Pinkham Press, one of only a handful of fine-art collaborative lithographic presses in the West. The list of artists who have been coming to the couple's Coleman Creek studio to try new forms of expression reads like a who's who of the region's art scene: Eugene Bennett, Betty LaDuke, Lyle Matoush, Jack McClarty, J. Ellen Austin, Robert Emery Johnson, Wataru Sugiyama, Lucy Warnick and many others.What's a collaborative studio? "You don't bring your painting to have me make prints," Linda Pinkham says with a laugh. "It's a place artists can work on stones or plates and make original prints with my help in the printing process." Take for example a work titled "Between Light and Dark." It's a photo-lithograph of Southern Oregon University art professor Wes Chapman which mixes photographs of birds with drawings in a striking, red artwork with a three-dimensional-feel. Included in the exhibit in addition to lithographs are monoprints, woodblocks and etchings. Here are lithographs in which Ashland artist Bruce Bayard plays with a rich visual vocabulary of flying machines, flags and other symbols. Here are Cody Bustamonte's treatments of wing themes suggesting birds, bats, angels. Here is a kitschy, neo-pop image of a Madonna with a cigarette created by Pinkham. However and by whomever the works in the show were created, all were printed at the Pinkhams' studio. Many are lithographs. Lithography is a process in which the image to be printed is rendered on a stone or a sheet of aluminum and treated so that it will retain ink while the non-image areas are treated to repel ink. Lithography has changed little since its beginnings in 1798, Pinkham says, and has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance in recent years. It's a complex process involving 21 separate chemical steps to prepare the plates and separate positive and negative images.Pinkham says she saw lithography more as a magic ritual than a logical process the entire first year she spent doing it in the late 1980s. Most painters don't want to spend the time to unravel the lithographic mysteries, she says, creating the need for master printers. Pinkham is a former head of the printmaking program at SOU. She was mentored by master printer Lyle Matoush there. In turn, Matoush had studied with Ernest DeSoto, one of the first certified master printers from New Mexico's famed Tamarind Institute of Lithography."I like it because it's the most painterly of the printing processes," Pinkham says of lithography. That's because the artist can paint directly on the stone or metal that will be used in making the print, unlike, say, printing processes in which material must be carved away. Lithographs give colors not attainable by other processes, she says -- bright, intense and unique. |
