History of Printmaking

The first relief stamps were cut seals and brands used to mark animals and prisoners as property. Clay tiles, metals and wood were the first prints made to transfer images. The first actual prints are actually from China. 
 In Europe, textile makers were using block prints to decorate cloth before the widespread use of paper in their part of the world. In about the 1400's, paper milling became a widespread fact in Europe, making the printing and dissemination of their own type of religious images possible.

Medieval Christians used the printed image to spread their religion across the continent through obsession and sacred objects that the masses could develop in daily religious practices. Often, images of saints were printed onto thin paper, to be consumed through the mouth and protect the person eating the image from illness or ill-wishes. Prints of saints were often pasted into boxes, to protect the contents from theft and damage.

The first European books were printed from woodblocks in Germany in the mid-15th century. Artists of the late 15th and 16th century in Europe used woodcuts to depict religious objects, making the images accessible outside of the homes of the wealthy.

The intaglio print, a process that develops a metal plate, first developed among goldsmiths and engravers, but was soon put to use to print images of saints, honest story and tarot and playing cards! The first printmakers were considered more craftsmen that artists, employed in creating copies of another artist’s image. Printmakers worked collectively in workshops, transferring the original images of artists onto plates and then printing an edition of them for sale during the late 16th Century. 

Lithographs are produced by drawing with a greasy pencil on limestone and are then produced based on the idea that oil and water don’t mix. Lithography reached viable success soon after its discovery and became popular with artists due to its honesty to the original image. A lithographic print is the exact replica of the drawing the artist places upon the stone.  Artists like Honore Daumier, who developed Lithography in creating satiric illustrations and political cartoons. 

In Japan, Printmaking developed through contact with China. By the early 18th century, Japanese printmakers were developing methods of colour printing, painting woodblocks by hand using water-based inks. Japanese printmaking dealt mostly with popular imagery such as the latest fashions in theatre and clothing, but some artists used the woodcut to create landscapes and images of ideal feminine beauty.

Printmaking is the most common process utilized by artists in all cultures in creating and spreading ideas and quotidian images. In Mexico, Jose Guadalupe Posada used metal cuts to illustrate publications sold mainly to the poor. The Taller de Grafica Popular, established by Leopoldo Mendez, Luis Arenal and Pablo O’Higgins in 1937.  

TGP published a series of prints and books that created a sense of Pan-American unity among the working class and artists. In New York, Robert Blackburn founded The Printmaking Workshop in 1948, which focused on Intaglio and Lithography. 

Printmaking has successfully developed into an equally aesthetic and commercial process due to its accessibility. The widespread use of screen-printing in the 1960’s another planographic process utilizing stencils, a nylon screen and commercial printing ink–made the production of both commercial and political posters accessible to anyone with a screen and a squeegee. During the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, screen-printing was used to create beautiful and informative posters that called for equal rights, an end to war and the unity of all people who desired peace and justice. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles has an archive of both modern and contemporary posters with this aim.


The art of printmaking is alive and well today. Whether practicing relief, intaglio, lithography or screen-printing, printmakers are united under one aim: to make work that can be reproduced countless times in order to reach a wide audience. Contemporary careers such as Self-help Graphics, La Mano Press and The Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop continue to offer young artists the opportunity to apprentice in and then practice the art of Printmaking.

Josef Albers

 

Josef Albers was born on the 19th of march 1888 and died on the 25th of march 1976, he was a German-born American artist and educator. His work in Europe and the United States was highly influential and far-reaching. His ideas formed the basis of many art education programs in the 20th century.

In 1963 he published Interaction of color which presented his theory that colors were governed by an internal and deceptive logic. A key idea, which he proved by examples, was that our perception of color is not constant. It is influenced by the juxtaposition (placing together) of one color with another. This interested artists interested in optical illusions.


Albers is best remembered for his work as an abstract painter and theorist. Most famous of all are the hundreds of paintings and prints that make up the series Homage to the squares. In this rigorous series, begun in 1949, Albers explored chromatic interactions with flat colored squares arranged inside each other. This was a union of geometric abstraction with experiments in color.


Albers’s important works include the glass pictures that he created in 1928 during his Bauhaus period, designs for furniture and everyday utility objects made of wood and glass, as well as his Structural Constellation series that was realized between 1950 and 1958. His artwork, which finished in the Homage to the Square series, has been distinguished with numerous awards.

Bauhaus

 

It was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimer by German architect Walter Gropius. The objective was to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of arts. The reason for this was to combine architecture, sculpture and painting into a single creative expression. He invented a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers able to create useful and beautiful objects that fit into this new system of living.

Summary, he wanted to create a new type of art where you could create the weird and wonderful and were people could express themselves through different medium of arts.

It combined elements of both fine arts and design education. This commenced with a preliminary course that immersed students, who came from different social areas and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, colour theory and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This course was taught often by visual artists including Paul Klee, Vasily Kandisky and Josef Albers among others.

The cabinetmaking workshop was one of the most popular at the Bauhaus. Under the direction of Marcel Breuer from 1924 to 1928, this studio reconceived the very essence of furniture, often seeking to dematerialize conventional forms such as chairs to their minimal existence. Breuer theorized that eventually chairs would become obsolete, replaced by supportive columns or air. Inspired by the extruded steel tubes of his bicycle, he experimented with metal furniture, ultimately creating lightweight, mass-producible metal chairs. Some of these chairs were deployed in the theater of the Dessau building.

 

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Frank Gehry - Chair project

Frank Gehry was born in Toronto, Canada on February 28, 1929. He studied at the University of Southern California and Harvard University. Gehry, based in Los Angeles since the 1960s, is among the most acclaimed architects of the 20th century, and is known for his use of bold, postmodern shapes and unusual fabrications. Gehry's most famous designs include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Lost Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

 

After leaving Harvard, Frank Gehry returned to California, making a name for himself with the launch of his "Easy Edges" cardboard furniture line. The Easy Edges pieces, crafted from layers of uneven cardboard, sold between 1969 and 1973.

Still primarily interested in building rather than furniture design, Gehry changed a home for his family in Santa Monica with the money earned from Easy Edges. The remodel involved surrounding the existing small house with uneven steel and chain-link fence, effectively splitting the house open with an angled skylight.

In 2011, Gehry returned to his roots as a residential designer, unveiling his first skyscraper, in New York City, and in China.

The Santa Monica home, like much of Gehry's work, is an example of the Deconstructivist style—a post-structuralist aesthetic that challenges accepted design paradigms of architecture while breaking with the modernist ideal of form following function. Gehry was one of a number of contemporary architects pursuing this style, which, for years, has been particularly visible in California.

 

Gehry is known for his choice of unusual materials as well as his architectural philosophy. His selection of materials such as corrugated metal lends some of Gehry's designs an unfinished or even crude aesthetic.

Brenda Hartill - Printmaking

Born in London, Brenda Hartill emigrated to New Zealand with her parents, in the late fifties, and was educated there graduating FA honours at the University of Auckland.

Brenda Hartill is an innovative British painter / printmaker based in East Sussex where she has a studio.

Her work explores the texture, pattern and light of landscape, and ranges from finely drawn figurative works to bold, heavily embossed abstract images. She is most interested in the strong light and shadow of Southern Europe, as well as remote New Zealand.

In the early eighties, in search for more artistic independence, she turned towards printmaking and has been successfully been publishing her own work from her own large studio. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers.

 Alongside the printmaking, Hartill also finds a more direct painterly approach refreshing, and has recently rediscovered the clear colour and overlaying possibilities of watercolor in her abstract works which serve to extend the vocabulary she uses. In addition the three dimensional have always interested her. The more sculptural embossed etchings and calligraphy have led to a breaking away from print on a single piece of paper to mixed media compilations for example the "floating landscapes".

She is becoming increasingly interested in painting, creating a series of embossed watercolor paintings, as well as her mixed-media collage paintings using oil paint and encaustic wax .  Her recent work includes a series of unique monoprints, in muted colours, and black and white, and there is a strong element of embossing in the latest prints