| Bedside
Companion
Harald Johnson looms large in this month's update of the World Printmakers
site, both for his article on the current state
of the giclée art and for his new book, Mastering
Digital Printing. It's a wonderful book, beautifully crafted and
amenably written by the founder and moderator of Yahoo's Digital-Fineart discussion
list, and I suspect it's going to have a far broader appeal than might be expected.
It will, of course, be the bedside companion and standard handbook for photographers
and digital printmakers from all over the world, but my suspicion is that it will
also have an irresistable appeal to many traditional printmakers who harbor a
gnawing curiosity about digital printmaking. Just how significant is it? What
kind of people are doing it? Who follows it? And, above all, how does one get
started creating digital prints? Johnson's book has the answers to all these questions
and much more, and is destined to leave a profound imprint on modern printmaking. You
Can Escape the Unbearably Prosaic!
On days when your workaday life
seems unbearably prosaic did you ever dream about escaping to a paradisiacal Greek
island, connected to the outside world only by a daily ferryboat, and blessed
with an abundance of sunshine, friendly natives, fresh fish and an etching studio?
Too good to be true, right? Wrong! Such a place exists. It was discovered by American
printmaker and art activist, Gloria Carr, who promptly created the only thing
it lacked: a printmaking workshop. Best of all, it's open to printmakers from
all over the world, including you! Read all about it in One
Printmaker's Dream, the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts. A
World Printmakers Call for Work
One of several tempting projects
which arose out of the recent Estampa print fair in Madrid was an initiative which
we have named provisionally, "The Five-Plate Project." It's a commission
from an international wholesale art dealer for World Printmakers to select
and coordinate ten printmakers to create five editions of 150 prints each, a total
of 750 prints per artist, or 7,500 prints in all. The first artist is already
at work, but we need nine more, so if you are a full-time professional printmaker
with your own workshop and the capacity to produce this volume of work on schedule
(we're talking about a 5-6 month time frame) we'd
like to hear from you. Rest
Easy
We can all rest easy. Andy MacDougall is back, this time with
Sustainable Screen Printing, an upbeat, informative
piece on cleaning up one's ecological act in the studio. It seems there is a lot
we can do in our respective studios both for our own health and that of the planet,
and Andy, who would never ingest anything more toxic than a cold beer, provides
us with an all-inclusive checklist, accompanied by a fetching photograph of his
pretty young lab assistant attired for one of those science fiction films where
everybody catches ebola and oozes.
Internet
Ergo Sum and Vice Versa
World Printmakers routinely publishes
advances on print-related events and calls for work from all round the world.
We consider it a service both to event organizers and to printmakers and are happy
to do it. The other day we received a request from the organizers of a juried
show to publish their call for work and it occurred to me, quite automatically,
to have a quick look at their website. I couldn't find it on Google. I couldn't
find it on Yahoo. It turns out they don't have a website. This fact alone gave
me an instant case of cold feet. Is it possible to organize a serious international
juried show without a website? I have honest doubts regarding the seriousness
of anyone who would try to do so. In the end we did not publish their call for
work. I mention this incident, as I wonder if it is a genuine sign of the times,
or just a reflection of my own technophile prejudices. It is simply inconceivable
to me that any relevant international art project can be carried out without a
presence on the World Wide Web. To paraphrase one of my father's favorite old
saws: "Anything worth doing is worth doing on Internet!"
The
year two thousand and three is just around the corner. Given the current state
of world affairs, dare we wish you a happy, prosperous and peaceful new year?
We'll try, in any case! See
you next month. Count
your blessings! Mike
& Maureen Booth
Editors & Publishers
World Printmakers
The
Worldwide Showcase for
Contemporary Fine-Art Printmakers
URL: http://www.worldprintmakers.com
Email: miguel@worldprintmakers.com
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