World Printmakers Newsletter, 1

December, 2000

What's New at World Printmakers?
Practically everything is new. The year is new, the Millenium is new and this little newsletter is new. World Printmakers has new content, new partners, new artists, new perspectives. And new causes to champion.

Live Artists
Let's start with these. We have decided to dedicate our efforts in the year 2001 to the defence of live artists. Sounds obvious, doesn't it? It's the live, working artists who are creating today's new artwork and putting down the foundations for the future. It is they who are determining the new directions which art will take in coming years (and fascinating new directions they are!) And, incidentally, it is they who have to feed their children and pay their bills. Why then is the greater part of media attention devoted to great artists of the past? Because their names are household words? Because their work commands astronomical figures in the marketplace? Because they're considered good investments? Because journalists find it much quicker and easier to dazzle readers with the auction prices of big-name classic artists than to try to figure out what contemporary artists are doing and to create thoughtful, relevant commentary?

With no disrespect for Picasso, Miró, Warhol, Rothko, nor any of the other deceased modern masters who are currently lining bank vaults, we'd like to do our small part to point out that artistic life on this planet continues, and there are some fascinating things happening out there right now, today. Again, with all due respect, here at World Printmakers we will be putting the emphasis on artists who are still kicking.

Full Disclosure
World Printmakers is about to undergo some transformations and we've been browsing round the Web to see what other art sites are doing. Some of them are nice, others frankly nasty. A lot of them seem to have a crassly commercial used-car-lot look. Many of them offer "prints" that aren't prints, as we understand the limited-edition fine-art print. And the current rise of digital imagery (through no inherent fault of its own!) only serves to confuse the issue, as it brings on to the market "giclée prints" which are little more than photocopies of paintings printed on high-quality inkjet printers. One of them offers a "limited edition" of 2,850! How do we combat these nefarious tendencies? With information, I think. I had an email from Cam Timlick the other day. Cam is an art dealer in western Canada (http://www.imagemakers.mb.ca ) and he suggested the term "full disclosure" as a first step in bringing some order to the world of the fine-art print.

Cam suggests that graphic artists always accompany the work they sell with a complete documentation as to the techniques, dates, reproduction procedures, editions, originals, paper, workshop, etc. The more information the better: Full Disclosure. Cam says: "This would help educate consumers as to what they are purchasing, what was the process involved and the artist's involvement in the process. This would force artists producing "limited- edition reproductions" into admitting that they really didn't have any involvement with the creation of the reproduction and that it IS a reproduction. "I think that reproduction artists like using the name "print" in describing the reproduction as it lends a feeling of value to it. Now, I'm certainly not against artists making a living by selling reproductions. I sell them myself. But I do think they should be labelled as to what they really are." We subscribe to Cam's philosophy wholeheartedly and will do our best to implement it on the World Printmakers site this year. (Printmakers please take note: Along with your submissions we need all the information possible on each print: Full Disclosure.)

The Evolution of World Printmakers
The World Printmakers project (http://www.worldprintmakers.com) started out last February as an experiment, practically a hobby. I, Mike Booth, unrepentant freelance journalist, had an urge to mount an Internet project and was looking for an appropriate subject. The subject, it turns out, was close at hand. My printmaker wife, Maureen (http://www.maureenbooth.com), suggested I do something related to printmaking, a subject which I was fairly familiar with, having lived with a printmaker for 30 years. That's how Spanish Printmakers (http://www.spanishprintmakers.com) was born. The first "Spanish Printmakers" were my wife and a half dozen of her printmaker friends here in Spain. This site had an enthusiastic reception from a reduced circle of adepts, but it soon became clear that we needed to extend the range of the project. That's how WorldPrintmakers.com began. Having conquered Spain in a few short months, we set out to conquer the world! World Printmakers benefitted immediately from the printmaking activity already present on the Web and started to grow: more content, more artists, more page views, our first sales, our first paid advertisements. So, what began as a pastime soon became full time and now requires constant care and feeding. It's a labor of love and, though there's no money in it as yet, we think it has a brilliant future.

Surprisingly, the next step forward came not on the part of World Printmakers, but of our little sister, Spanish Printmakers. She was recently discovered by one of the top executives of Airtel, the Spanish mobile phone company, and invited to form part of their burgeoning Internet activities (http://www.navegalia.com, http://www.parqueempresarial.com ). This association with Airtel also means the opportunity to hire a couple of staff and to have the time and resources to develop new art-related projects on Internet. We have taken the precaution of registering the domain: worldsculptors.com, just in case. Airtel's proposal came at a breakfast meeting on the first day of the Estampa international print fair in Madrid, so I left a half-full cup of coffee on the table, made my way over to the fair and spent the next three days talking to printmakers, galleries, graphic arts workshops and print publishers. Almost all of them signed on enthusiastically for the Airtel Internet project (code name "Grabadores Españoles"), so in the next few months Spanish Printmakers will be undergoing a mild transformation and considerable growth, from a dozen artists to something like 200! Nested inside of the new Grabadores Españoles site, like the seed of the Yin inside the Yan, will be a big link to World Printmakers, which we're hoping will attract new visitors to this site, too.

Spanish Printmakers is also participating in a curious British Internet project (http://www.homezick.com) which is a sort of online Welcome Wagon for international executives who find themselves transferred, along with their families, to far-off foreign countries. We'll be the providers of Spanish graphic art for "homesick" families of Spanish executives destined in exotic outposts from London to Berlin and beyond. From here we want to wish the best of luck, to Lennart Bjolgerud (a Norwegian Londoner!) and his whole Homezick team for this exceedingly-well-conceived-and-executed Internet initiative.

This Month's Updates to World Printmakers
First our new printmakers: · Dare Birsa from Slovenia, our first artist from this beautiful little country wedged between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia. · Miguel Angel Escobedo, our first Mexican printmaker. · David Kenning, British watercolourist and screen-print artist resident for many years in Málaga, Spain. · David Valentine, California printmaker who finds his inspiration in the most unlikely places and who tells us the story of each of his prints. · Marilynn Smith, a printmaker who would rather be in Baja California. · Paul Mcconnachie, our first Scottish printmaker. Our new cover image is by Bill Fisher, who is known round the world not only for his prints but for his university-art-departments website: http://billfisher.dreamhost.com .

In keeping with our commitment to digital printmaking, we offer this month Alan Bamburger's Giclée Update, illustrated with digital images created by Spanish artist, Pepe Bornoy. Andy Macdougall's Virtual Screen Print Course has become very popular. I was delighted recently to see one artist recommending it to another on an Internet printmakers' forum. This month, in Chapter 4, Andy discusses exposure, and illustrates his remarks with images produced in his screen printing studio in Courtenay, near Vancouver, BC. (http://www.parapress.com). Coming soon: The World Printmakers Digital Image Downloads.

Cheers till next time,

Mike Booth
Coordinator
World Printmakers
http://www.worldprintmakers.com
miguel@worldprintmakers.com