Printmaking Zine Seen 

Future of a printmaking online magazine 

In the heyday of printmaking, as hundreds and thousands of us who were from 20 to 60 years of age enjoyed a boom in the field of printmaking due to post WWII economic growth, we spoke of the “printmaking scene.” We are poised for a new “Printmaking Seen.” 

Crow or human, creativity doesn’t change

We watched a crow on YouTube as he figured out how to solve an 8-part puzzle and win his reward. As I ready for the launch of the world’s first printmaking magazine online, I think how like that crow we are, driven toward a reward to the extent that we create solutions to problems and overcome obstacles.

For the crow, it was short stick versus long stick, two pebbles versus one pebble, and so forth. His first challenge was to get the first stick, and then use the first, short little stick, to get a longer stick. That crow must have practiced to achieve the knowledge of getting the short stick out of the string in which it was bound.

I am like that crow, figuring out how to get the first thing I need to launch an exciting new online magazine which is inspired by printmaking and which inspires people to think about printmaking in ways that are suitable—and sustainable—in the 21^st Century.

First, what is the reward?

The crow wanted the prize—a piece of meat; through many trial-and-error sessions, the trainer taught the crow how to get rewards. Maybe I am like that crow--who was hatched to be a mere crow. I was born and raised to be a farmer,but since I was captivated by comic book graphics, record jackets and movie posters, I was tempted by a great notion of a better prize.

I credit my father (whose birthday is today) for showing me how to win prizes in livestock competitions, how to take apart machines or fix them, sell scrap metal and pumpkins to make extra cash, and many more things—including a love of Nature and growing things, and about birth and death and the cycles of life.

However, my school teachers saw—among all the many farm kids like me who were in their classes—one who was very good at drawing: me. I got more praise from my teachers and peers for my art than I did for my prize livestock or mechanical skills. Plus, there was artistic talent on my mother’s side. A painting by my Great Grandmother Jennie Davis had always been in our home, and my mother painted watercolors.

At an early age, I thought that to be an artist must be a fine thing—better, probably, than farming with its gritty work, meager payback, and no praise. There must be a better life, I thought, a better reward; if only I could find a way to get it. Like the crow in the video, I needed a short stick.

Stick to it

Farming teaches you persistence, so that, when I left the farm to go to college and pursue art, I had persistence going for me. If an art teacher made us spend hours staring at the same thing and drawing every detail, it was not as difficult for me as it is for some. If you had to take courses that seemed to have nothing to do with art, then I would do it if I were rewarded with a degree or a certificate and pursue my love of art—not end up back on the farm.

When the Vietnam conflict was taking young men like me, I stayed the course I set, which was to be a college art teacher. Luckily, a position opened up at the last minute and saved me from the draft. I taught for nineteen years. What a prize that was!

It must have felt like that for that crow when it first saw the connection between getting a stick and using it to rake up a piece of meat. It was a generation when printmaking-as-art was booming and printmaking classes gained enrollment. My students were intrigued with making images by any means other than drawing and painting. Mixing media came with Pop Art and new technologies; printmaking served me as a starting point to extend the printing to electronic and digital arts. My students showed me links to performing arts, too.

The longer stick

What is the “longer stick” that I need to get to the next step—making an online printmaking magazine—come about? It took fifty years for me to get the “short stick”, which is the reward of understanding that—ever lucky in love and my passion for printmaking—I have a vision of things just over the horizon in the field of printmaking.

Is this stick, my vision and the persistence to follow it, adequate? Printmaking, as I experienced it then, was buoyed up by painters in a healthy economy. Publishers were investing millions to make large-scale, multiple color prints by name artists; profits were astounding. Universities responded and built up their printmaking departments—buying presses at $25,000 apiece for their faculties’ facilities.

If the economic health of the US had sustained, then printmaking—and the careers of students who took printmaking in college—might be more secure today. Printmaking studios would flourish and artists would sell out their editions via numerous art gallery shows, and printmaking exhibitions would be popping up all over. There would be a printmaking magazine of renown, plus an online printmaking magazine.

A different path

I want an online printmaking magazine that compares with Ceramics Today, or ArtNews. However, I do not want to copy these “Legacy” magazines, i.e., digital versions of paper magazines.

On the other hand, mainstream magazines and newspapers like Wired and The Wall Street Journal are too large-scale to use as models for a niche such as printmaking. Printmaking shares something with ceramics, however, because printmaking is an experience-based art. People make prints for many of the same reasons people make pots. It is fun, and the rewards of the experience are larger than the financial rewards. Also, they do it again and again, step-wise.

I would have been a potter had it not been a field that is so crowded; also, my hand-eye coordination helped me win attention as a drawer. College—those lecture classes that had little appeal to me at first—taught me something about content in art, literature, and history. At the outset of the digital boom of the 1980s, content became king and the basis for the new economy of the age of digital reproduction and the internet. I am glad I mingled new technologies with traditional printmaking when I did, but I still have the crow’s dilemma: How do I get the longer stick?