Arts and Entertainment
Forty years later, printmaking presses on
By Taylor Coe '13, Arts & Entertainment Editor
September 29, 2011
Printmaking is a fascinating art. One might even offer that it tends to the opposite of reality.
“What you get is the reverse of what you see,” said Amy George Buchholz ’80 to the dozen Kirkland and Hamilton alumnae, parents and other guests in attendance at the intaglio printmaking workshop on Saturday afternoon in List.
“It’s like looking at yourself in a photograph,” Buchholz added, commenting on the somewhat otherworldly notion of thinking about seeing the opposite of the world while trying to set it down on a copper plate.
“You get used to it,” said Professor of Art Bill Salzillo, who also helped run the workshop along with Buchholz, Professor of Art Bruce Muirhead and Jake Muirhead ’80.
In addition to the workshop, List also hosted a temporary show of prints for the Bicentennial Weekend. The prints were separated into two sections—one consisting of 100 prints from different students over the course of Professor Muirhead’s 40-year career at both Kirkland and Hamilton, selected from the work of 1,000 students and the other section consisting of a display of the work of the Atelier 4.
The Atelier 4—the name that Salzillo, Buchholz, Muirhead and Muirhead have taken as a group—displayed 40 prints, with 10 from each artist. This exhibit marked the seventh show for the group, who have taken their work on a tour around colleges in upstate New York. The tour has served as good exposure for not only their work in particular, but for the art practice in general.
“A lot of people don’t know what printmaking is,” Salzillo said.
In seeming compliance with Salzillo’s observation, most of the workshop participants didn’t seem to have a clue what the printmaking process entailed. With a nod to scholarly clarity, the Atelier 4 squeezed a semester’s worth of knowledge about printmaking into the terse span of half an hour—an overview of the process from the use of diamond-point needles (Buchholz uses an industrial diamond-point needle normally used to create computer chips for some drypoint etchings) to the use of the press.
Demonstrating the form of drypoint etching, Buchholz etched out a rough spot on a copper plate and passed it around the room for everyone to feel. The rough spots on a plate where lines are extremely close and cross over one another can even result in a uniform black background thanks to the way the plate traps ink and transfers it to paper.
“A lot of etching is tactile,” explained Buchholz. “You have to feel it.”
After that whirlwind introduction, the participants were set to work.
If the Atelier 4 wanted to drive anything home for the participants, it was the sense of collaboration created by the printmaking process.
“This studio has a kind of gravity that brings people together,” said Salzillo, speaking in particular of his experience with the other three members of Atelier 4.
The bonds that hold these four artists together are multifaceted; they are friends, students, teachers and even family. Salzillo was a student of Bruce Muirhead at Middlebury, but later became friends when working together at Kirkland. Buchholz and Muirhead were both art students while at Hamilton (although Buchholz technically attended Kirkland for two years) and were naturally in contact with both Salzillo and Muirhead.
The workshop relationship between the four of them, Salzillo insisted, is nothing like that of painters simply working alone in a studio.
“Printmaking,” said Salzillo, “has a unique, collaborative quality.”
This tradition of printmaking is key not only to the art department of Hamilton, but to the trajectory and philosophy of a creative, artistic education born at Kirkland College and accepted into the Hamilton education and curriculum after the college merger in 1978.
The art on display reinforces the importance of printmaking in the history of art education at Hamilton. The 100 selected student prints, far more than the work of the professional artists, punctuates that importance. As most of the student prints are without attribution, they become an impressive testament to the enduring relevance of art in Hamilton’s existence.