Print Lovers at 30: Celebrating Three Decades of Giving

Eccentric Eyes

Printmaking for centuries has been a bastion for the eccentric vision of solitary artists whose highly personal iconographies run counter to the prevailing trends of their time.  Artist and writer Ruth Weisberg, accurately described this phenomenon in “The Syntax of the Print: In Search of an Aesthetic Context” (The Tamarind Papers):

While in the past thirty years printmaking reflects every style and trend, it was often a refuge for the artist whose work was figurative, narrative, socially conscious or literary. It was a less rigid corner of the art world─one in which formalist aspects of modernism could be circumvented.

Artists such as James Barsness, Christopher Brown, John Buck, Eleanor Erskine and Ed Paschke use printmaking to create astounding images. Many are highly complex color prints with entangled layers of symbol, icon and imagery. They appear to self-animate before our eyes as part of a corner of the art world filled with imagination and wonder.

Eleanor H. Erskine, b. 1961
Labyrinth I, 1995
F95-25

Ed Paschke, 1939-2004
Poderosa (Powerful), 1991
F92-5

Christopher Brown, b. 1951
Zigzag I, 1991
F94-4

James Barsness, b. 1954
The Midgaard Serpent, 2000
2001.8

John E. Buck, b. 1946
La Grande Eclipse, 1982
2004.2