Halfwood Press Ozine  

A different slant on this year’s topic  

For six month he has been ruminating on to option to quit working on Halfwood Presses and take up publishing an online printmaking magazine for the printmaking world. Now it occurs to him he can stay on the pathway he made on the Halfwood Line—a platform.  

Walk the line

Johnny Cash’ famous song goes:

“I keep a close watch on this heart of mine

I keep my eyes wide open all the time

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds

Because you’re mine, I walk the line.”

The Halfwood line of presses has kept me focused for ten years, giving me a thing to pop my eyes wide open in the morning and work on all day. I keep the incoming feedback from people who bought them, and that gives me ties to bind my artistic vision with social and economic ties.

In this sense, I could say I “own” the Halfwood press; it’s mine. I wanted to be a printmaking teacher, and because the Halfwood Press is mine—and my invention of the PressGhost and serious games—I walk the line.

Halfwood Ozine

Almost a year ago—on the tenth anniversary of the Halfwood Press concept that came together as the Century Halfwood Press—I knew change was coming. We are deep into the age of digital reproduction and the conventional printmaking world has drifted far from its roots in performance and technology arts. A new generation, led by the Millennials, is re-shaping the printmaking world, finding in printmaking elements suitable to the 21^st Century.

Printing has been the Nexus of performance and technology which has given us the artifacts of human history. For example, an ancient people’s civilization is discovered and we see it in printed and broadcast images. A prehistoric person in a cave smears his or her hand with paint and prints it on the wall, or spatters pigment over it to leave a stencil—an act, a performance. It might have been a performance we can guess at and, again, we see the artifact in printed and broadcast pictures.

Thanks to the art world, printmaking has been isolated from performance, and only artifact of the printmaking performance—the fine art print—is celebrated and traded in the art market. With the generation of young artists with whom I spent the first part of my career as a college teacher, I learned how to restore the tie that binds printmaking with performance arts and, subsequently, to photography, film, video and games.

Everything ventured, everything gained

I walked off campus in 1985 never to return to the cloistered academic world where printmaking was hewn of its branches to the performing arts and technological inventions of the digital age. The root of printmaking is to be seen in those hand prints on the walls of caves, alongside the laborious, gifted work of painters and sculptors who gave us the paintings of their game. I like to think it was an impulse that made someone figure out that they could make a perfectly good image of their hand by painting and printing it, or stenciling.

That might have been one of the creative leaps of imagination and realization of something new, and that was the beginning of mechanical reproduction. This was the coming together of art and technology, and the Halfwood Press venture taught me how to make an instrument out of an etching press to go along with restoring the ties of printmaking arts with performance arts.

It helps that the presses are beautiful and functional “machines” in ways similar to musical instruments—harps, pianos, oboes, guitars, etc. A renowned guitar musician was interviewed on the radio and I heard him say, “You define your instrument, and then it defines you.”

We—my wife and I and quite a number of our friends—invested everything in the Halfwood Press venture. Now it would appear that the winds are shifting and our craft is going to become an online magazine, the Halfwood Press Ozine.