World Printmakers
Newsletter, No. 9 December, 2001

Digital Daze
It's been an intensely digital month. First of all the artists from the Digital-Fineart email forum (http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/digital-fineart) took up our challenge and produced an exclusive (their first, but surely not their last) group show for the World Printmakers site. Ably conducted by Harald Johnson, Digital-Fineart's creator and moderator and curated by digital artist, Art Avery (both of whom have works in the show), it's an interesting cross section of subjects and styles, ranging from more or less straight photography scanned and printed by digital methods, to images created wholly in the computer. You can access it from our homepage: http://www.worldprintmakers.com.

Then Javier Blas at the Calcografia Nacional in Madrid sent us a half dozen images from their recent exhibit of digital reproductions of the faces out of Goya's "Caprichos" etchings. I find these images absolutely awe inspiring, not only for their aesthetic and emotional impact, but for their deceptive simplicity. Seen through the microscope of digital imaging (and blown up big for the show - 160x120 cm.) one can clearly appreciate the fact that Goya's momentous etchings are just a collection of simple burin strokes, seemingly artless in their crudeness and simplicity, but taken together they make up one of the most moving chapters in the history of Western art, or perhaps I should say of Western history, insofar as they transcend most "art" as we know it.

More Printmaking Workshops and Artists
This month's workshop interview, the fourth of the series, is with Franck Bordas of the print workshop of the same name in Paris. Franck works with established artists from both Europe and the U.S.A. and his workshop has a solid reputation and a loyal following among artists and collectors. If you ever wondered how they do it in Paris, here's the answer.

World Printmakers has a new artist this month from Bosnia-Herzogovina. His name is Admir Mujkic, he lives in Sarajevo and his work is exotic, intricate and original. Sarajevo and it's people inspire a tremendous empathy in me. In the eighties, when I was European correspondent for an American hotel guide, we used to visit Yugoslavia every other summer. Sarajevo was always one of the high points on the trip.

We would head straight for the marketplace in the old town, park the car and queue up at one of the little restaurant stalls in the square. There we would stuff ourselves with chebabchichi (my phonetic spelling), charcoal-grilled rolls of ground lamb served in pita bread, followed up by cool sour yogourt. The atmosphere there always seemed very special to me: joyous, hospitable and earthy, like an Italian wedding. So it gives me a special satisfaction to welcome Admir to World Printmakers and to wish him the greatest success in printmaking.

Marketing Anyone?
Our American-marketing-expert friend, Bob Schwartz, stopped round last weekend, enroute from Connecticut via London and Paris. Bob's recently retired but he's having trouble breaking his old transatlantic habits. "What do people, artists and art buyers, look for in World Printmakers?" he asked me. "Well, I think collectors are looking for interesting new work and the artists are looking for sales, techniques and exposure..." "What do you mean 'you think'," says Bob. "You mean you haven't asked them?!"

Bob's absolutely right, of course. The only way to find out what people want or need is to ask them. So, it seems we'll be preparing a big readers' survey for next month. We'll post it on the site and ask you to take a few minutes of your time to answer some questions. Hopefully, after we've tallied the results, we'll have a clearer idea of how World Printmakers can serve your needs just a little bit better.

Before I go I want to give a plug to a very useful little monthly magazine called Art Calendar. Nor only is it rich with artist-oriented feature stories and useful information for artists, but they were kind enough to publish my print-fraud article in their October issue, along with Andy MacDougall's lively reply. Their website is at http://www.artcalendar.com. Have a look.

In last month's newsletter we promised to create a "virtual press room" for World Printmakers to help make it fast and convenient for the media to access the resources they need (text, pictures and like that...) in order to give World Printmakers the press coverage it so richly deserves(!) That pressroom is now online (top of the homepage) and you're authorized to have a look at it, even if you're not an editor.

T'is the Season
Christmas is upon us and Bob Schwartz insists that I remind you that the most elegant and thoughtful gift you can give, whether as a personal or a business gesture, is an original fine-art print. And there just happen to be more than a thousand of them on the pages of World Printmakers.

Art helps.

Kind holiday regards,

Mike & Maureen Booth
Editors & Publishers
World Printmakers
The Worldwide Showcase for Contemporary Fine-Art Printmakers
URL: http://www.worldprintmakers.com
Email: miguel@worldprintmakers.com

P.S. Not to bore you, but World Printmakers established another traffic record in November: 27,000 page views, 17% up from 23,000 in October.