Four Points Of View Essay
When Monica Church, artist and colleague at Dutchess Community College showed me her Suite du Nus etchings, I was intrigued by the blend of traditional technique and contemporary sensibility. Having seen the the circular images originally as fragmented and re-contextualized color photos, I felt that the translation into black and white images made them more mysterious. It seemed to formalize the images, thereby changing the cropped shapes into something with more import. Some of this effect comes from the patience manifested in the etching technique itself. Etching is a deliberative process with its controlled viscosities, its carefully timed chemical baths and artist’s proofs. There is usually some point during the printmaking when the artist cannot see the image; it is face down or covered with ink or some other active substance that is altering the surface. In digital printing it is being transformed into dots per inch which may then have to be adjusted from the artists original conception in pixels. What will the resolution be exactly? How close to what the artist envisioned? Or will some unforeseen result lead to a new direction? Such is the addictive intrigue of pulling a print. That suspenseful moment of peeling back the paper is a culmination of dedication to craft combined with willingness to innovate.

The artists in Four Points of View; Figuration in Printmaking, embody this dynamic approach. They have dipped into traditional and new technologies as their vision has led them, united by their engagement with the figurative legacy in art. That figurative connection leads from iconic Buddhist art, as in Jessica Baker’s work to the dailiness of Brian Lynch’s observed human interactions.

Fran Bull was in Barcelona at the Taller 46 with master printer Virgili Barbara when she went to see an exhibit at the Museum of Science. From this exhibit, concerning form and energy in Nature, she extracted a vocabulary of spirals, fractals and waves, “sparked by a sense of the interplay of matter, time and force-Nature’s own etching process.” She moved carborundum, a thick, sticky compound around on plexiglass plates, letting it harden and printing the resultant topography as dramatic black and white patterns. The artist says, “I portray not a shell…but the forces giving rise to that form.”

Jessica Baker has drawn her inspiration from another elemental source-the art of the past, specifically Buddhist and Hindu art seen on a recent trip to India. That inspiration is distilled and abstracted until she arrives at her own interpretation of that ancient iconography. Her intention is to “ transform the image from literal to symbolic.” Recently she has experimented with modifying the image in Photoshop, printing a transparency and then etching onto a solar plate.

Brian Lynch bases his anectdotal images on daily street scenes, “from the realm of my own experience…I am interested in the sketch being the raw material for developing a print.” He sketches into his PalmPilot, later uploading the images into a computeer and altering them in Photoshop. The resulting inkjet print then becomes raw material for an inked-up Xerox copy on glass. The final print is done on a traditional eching press. His adherence to art from observation reflects the influence of his apprenticeship with Alex Katz. The playful approach to technology is in service to his own artistic vision.

Monica Church’s working method also dips into a wide range of technologies. By digitally scanning kodachrome slides from the 1940’s and cropping them until they lose their original context almost completely, they become new positive/negative shapes, inviting whatever individual associations the viewer may bring.

All four artists, grounded in their craft, have then moved forward to freely explore variations on their themes. They provide us with surprising new possibilities for image-making. Their adventurous embrace of any and all “tools of the trade” helps to humanize the complexities of the digital technology. The results provide budding art students with an inspiring example of creative invention as an enriching and lifelong education.

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