Friday, October 28, 2016

The Print Club Edition


The Print Club of Rochester at
Tower Gallery, SUNY Brockport

This month at the Tower Gallery along on Holley Street at the campus of SUNY Brockport,  the Print Club of Rochester has landed with a new exhibition in celebration of being 85 years old as an organization.  The Tower Gallery with its' austere grey walls has been made lively with a collection of fresh prints and I was pleased to bring over a couple of my recent works for this new show.


The Print Club of Rochester is organized to promote a deepening interest and understanding of the fine art of printmaking, and from the looks of this show it is doing a good job attracting younger talent to go along with folks like me who have been involved in making prints for many years.


Alan Singer ( the author of this blog )
at
The Tower Gallery with The Print Club of Rochester

Creating prints by hand is a discipline that takes into  consideration the techniques, the inspiration of the artist, and the final medium that is employed to bring the art to a living place in the imagination of the gallery goer.  Printmakers have branched out from the woodcut, the lithograph, silkscreen or etching to encompass new materials like the transfer mono-prints that I exhibit in this show.  There is an ongoing discussion about new materials and techniques that are relevant to printmakers, and this process is evolving to include non-toxic forms of printmaking practiced by artists  such as the late Keith Howard who was teaching at R.I.T. for many years.




Elizabeth Durand and her print "Walking Mavis At Night"
selected as Best in Show
at 
The Tower Gallery, SUNY Brockport

In this new show at the Tower Gallery, Cynthia Hawkins of SUNY Geneseo is the juror and she has chosen a print by Elizabeth Durand as the Best in Show.  Liz Durand's art reminds me of a full page spread in a children's book; this print is called: "Walking Mavis at Night" and it features a topographic map and a silhouette of her dog, Mavis, in a moody landscape perhaps illuminated by moonlight.  Other juror's awards go to Kathleen Sherin for her print "SOTC" which is made as an abstract "carborundum calligraphic mono print" in three tall sections, and a print from Katharine Baca-Bielinis that is all about the textures found in Antonio Gaudi's "Sagrada Familia" of Barcelona, Spain.


Kathleen Sherin's print  "SOTC"
Juror's Choice Award

If you go to see this show you will find a wide variety of images in an assortment of sizes, but for me one of the most interesting things about this show is the "Print Exchange" - this is a yearly opportunity for members of the Print Club to exchange a little portfolio of prints with each other.  The print exchange has been a way to share a vision in a most friendly way with each artist supporting the work of the other in this endeavor.


The Print Exchange
in celebration of the Print Club of Rochester


I was also attracted to the prints from Claudia Mejia Willet, and in this context they represent for me an attractive way of combining imagery with color, verve, and mystery.  I was pleased to have my two prints in this show and they represent for me a place that I have been working  towards that weaves together visualizations of data through the lens of mathematics.  I try to add a capital A to the goals of STEM ( Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math ) and that adds up to STEAM.  I'm a great advocate of the STEAM initiative, and there is evidence of that in my prints.



The Print Club celebrates 85 years as an organization
promoting understanding, collecting, and creating fine art prints

Go out to see the Tower Gallery show, it is a good representation of what is being done in the printmaking arts.