World Printmakers
Newsletter, No. 7 September, 2001

Portentous Events, Our Responsibility
It's been a grim month. In the face of such portentous events, to spend time talking about printmaking seems almost frivolous. On the other hand, not to talk about it seems somehow irresponsible. While other people are busy fueling up attack aircraft and greasing tanks, the least that printmakers can do is to dampen paper, ink plates and pull prints, I think, in an ongoing affirmation that the finer things in life are also the basic things in life. In fact, now that I think of it, it's a top priority.

What's New?
So, what's new on World Printmakers? We've got new artists, mainly from Eastern Europe this time, who are stretching the envelope at both ends. Polish artist, Maciej Deja works in the antique and truly-magical medium of the mezzotint, while Bulgarian Dimitri Dimitrov creates pure digital imagery.

Between the two is Bernd Svetnik, art activist/painter/printmaker from Klagenfurt, Austria. Bernd is the founder and president of the Austrian Art Association. Their select, high-mountain summer art camps are becoming legendary for a few lucky art insiders. Maureen attended this summer and had the privilege of living and working with artists from Germany, Russia, Austria, China, Thailand, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Switzerland, Scotland and Slovenia. According to her report, the Russians are not out to bury us; they're too busy sculpting two-story wooden angel-totems with chainsaws, drinking vodka and shattering the glasses up against the wall!

What's Printing in Other Places?
Our Printmaking Workshops Round the World interviews are getting a lot of nice feedback. The latest one is with David Watt, director of the Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop, certainly one of the finest publicly-sponsored printmaking operations in Europe, very much in keeping with such a highly-civilized place as Edinburgh.

Dimiter Dimitrov

Maciej Deja

New Documentation
We have also incorporated some interesting new print documentation, courtesy of the Philadelphia Print Shop. I recently discovered their site, which deals mainly with antique prints, maps and books, and noticed their excellent feature on print nomenclature and abbreviations, and their dictionary of printmaking terms. I wrote their director, Chris Lane, and he very graciously gave his permission for us to reprint the two pages. I think you'll find them interesting.

You may be wondering what is happening with the World Printmakers Big International Juried (Virtual) Show, which we should have been announcing about now. We were off to a lovely start; everybody thought it was a good idea. We had signed up a really prestigious panel of international jurors (one each from Spain, Australia and the U.S.A.) and potential sponsors were beginning to express interest in the project. Then the horrendous events of September 11 occurred and everybody's priorities got changed around radically. So the Big Juried Show is on hold awaiting better times. Hopefully they won't be too long in coming.

Elitist, Us?
Lately we've been wondering if World Printmakers hasn't become a bit too much of an elitist site, almost exclusively directed to knowledgeable working printmakers and collectors. I mean we basically assume that everybody knows what an "intaglio print" is and a "soft ground," a "mezzotint," a "digital print," and like that. But in reality that's probably not the case.

In reality many of the people who visit the World Printmakers site probably don't know that much about the technical side of printmaking. We're thinking we should go back to basics a bit and run a series of illustrated articles on how the different types of fine-art prints are created.

If any of you would like to contribute a simple, straightforward how-to article on your printmaking specialty, we would be delighted to see it. It needn't be nearly thorough as Andy MacDougall's stuff on screen printing, as it is intended for an audience of neophytes. But we feel we should start taking our own advice (!) and begin to educate our readers on printmaking's basic techniques. So I promise to prepare a nice how-to-make-an-intaglio-print story for next month. Anybody else care to join me with their favorite technique? In the meantime, count your blessings.

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