What is PRINTMAKING?
The essence of printmaking is the matrix. To make a print is to make an original piece of art pulled as one of multiple impressions from the matrix. The matrix can take many different forms and there are lots of different techniques to transfer your image onto paper. Printing originally serves a practical purpose of reproduction. Making multiple identical renditions of a single image allows for mass production and quick circulation of content. Since the beginning of the modern laser printer, the practical usefulness of printmaking has lost it’s function in society and has now become a form of art that challenges the artist and the audience to question the motivation behind making art in the first place. Printmaking is about more than reproduction. It is an incredibly detailed and tedious discipline that requires patience and accuracy. To spend such a lengthy amount of time on a single project requires the artist to reflect on what the art discipline stands to serve.
Printmaking is an act of mindfullness and meditation. The magic for me happens in the translation between the matrix and the paper. The root of my experience and approach to printmaking is in the experimentation of transference. There is so much creativity and discovery involved in asking how many different ways can you experience one image. How many different marks can I make from the same object? There is a different process that happens for me when I draw or paint directly onto paper, verses creating a matrix and playing with the transference between my original design and how it imprints as the final piece.
Printmaking is a very technical process but as with all art, I believe that we are to learn the rules so that we know how to break then with intentionality. Over the years my printmaking experience has combined with a collage mindset to create unique monoprints and projects that would not have been achievable without the printmaking elements. Printmaking for me is not about reproduction but about play. I think all art is a duel experience of discipline and refinement of skills and spirit as well as a spiritual release of expression and play.
