Darden Smith- Airlie Suite
Artist Description:
Darden Smith’s multi-media practice encompasses songs, photography, drawing, illustration, video, printmaking, essays and performance. Moving between and combining mediums allows a broader horizon in which to work. As a musician and songwriter, he has released 17 full length albums and toured extensively in the US, UK and Europe. He has composed music for film, TV and dance/theater. Grand Motion, a full evening symphonic work, was commissioned by the Austin Symphony in 1999. Darden's artwork is in private and corporate collections in the US, UK and Europe, as well as the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs Collection.
Project Description:
This suite of 9 prints takes images from Darden Smith's sketchbook while he was an artist in residence in Airlie, Scotland. His sketches were scanned and turned into photopolymer plates, then printed with a chine collé background. The video shows the printing dance I would do around 20-30 times a day while editioning the 270 prints that went into this suite.
Billy Hassell- Rookery, High island
Artist Description:
Billy Hassell is a Texas-based artist with a focus on nature, conservation and the environment who produces oil paintings, color lithographs and watercolors and exhibits in galleries in Texas, Missouri and Colorado. Today Billy lives in Fort Worth, Texas with his two dogs in an urban neighborhood. His studio is a few blocks down the street in an old storefront where he paints daily. He has created a backyard oasis with many birds, flowers, and a pond filled with turtles, fish, and toads. He has brought his love of the outdoors to his urban home and he continues to express his love of nature in his work.
Project Description:
Billy Hassell came to Flatbed Press for a two-week lithographic collaboration with Alyssa Ebinger, Flatbed's head printer, and me. We started by having him draw a “key plate” that would have most of the tonal information for his image and that would ultimately be printed on top of layers of color from other plates. Alyssa and I looked at his past paintings to get a sense of the color palette he uses and developed a plan for the different lithographic plates we would need to fully flesh out the atmosphere of the scene Billy was creating. We decided to make six additional plates that would provide the color for the drawing on the key plate. Once he finished drawing the key plate, we printed a proof of it and set up mylars (transparencies) on top of the print so he could fill in all the areas in which each plate’s colors would be added. We turned all these transparencies into the photo lithography plates that would make up his color runs within the first week. The second week was used to fine-tune the precise colors to be used and the order in which we were going to print the runs. The final order we landed on was: red plate, blue plate, 3-color yellow blend plate, 4-color brown blend plate, 3-color aqua-yellow-coral blend plate, buff/beige plate, and the key plate was printed in a dark navy.
Billy, Alyssa, and I all liked the key drawing so much that we decided to print a smaller edition with a different color palette. We used 3 of the same plates from the original color print (the sky plate, brown plate, and key plate) and printed them in a 5-color monochrome palette.
3 runs: red, blue, and yellow blend
4 runs: added brown blend
5 runs: added sky blend
6 runs: added beige
7 runs: added key in dark navy
Alternate version printed with 3 plates (brown, sky, and key)
Curtis Patterson- copper collé
Artist Description:
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, sculptor Curtis Patterson’s parents instilled in him a strong sense of discipline, balance and spirituality. Being the grandson of a master carpenter fostered a deep affinity for working with his hands. With this solid foundation, Patterson earned his BA in Art Education from Grambling State University, an HBCU listed on the African American Heritage Trail. After time spent in secondary education, he earned his MFA from Georgia State University in Atlanta and was the first African American to receive an MFA in Sculpture from GSU. His practice has moved from painting, wood, and ceramics toward cast iron and large-scale, fabricated corten steel sculpture. Patterson was a faculty member at The Atlanta College of Art from 1976 to 2007. He entered the realm of large-scale, public work with Cometh the Sun commissioned by the City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs. His work includes commissions and permanent public sculpture installations in several prominent cities in the United States including: Atlanta, Georgia, Columbus, Ohio, St. Paul, Minnesota, Shreveport, Louisiana and Dallas, Texas.
Project Description:
Curtis Patterson initially came to Flatbed Press to work with us on a project he had started with another print shop that could not finish the project. We inherited the prints after a photolithograph of a slave ledger had already been printed, onto which we printed two different colored borders. Curtis used his expertise with metals to fabricate paper thin copper shapes comprised of African symbols, particularly Ghanaian, onto which he had applied various patinas. We turned these thin pieces of copper into stickers which we then applied to the prints, making a copper collé. The main pieces applied on top of the slave ledgers were two interlocking Sankofa, an African symbol of a bird looking backwards that represents the importance of learning from the past to move forward. The word Sankofa comes from the Akan tribe of Ghana and literally translates to “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind.”
After this initial project, we worked with Curtis twice more to make additional prints using the copper collé method we had developed.
Linda ridgway- monotypes
Artist Description:
Linda Ridgway (born 1947 in Jeffersonville, Indiana) creates poetic bronze wall reliefs that convey both autobiographical and cultural imagery. Although educated as a printmaker, Ridgway continues to experiment with the limits of various media to create work that remains intimate regardless of scale. Ridgway’s bronzes emerge from a two-dimensional template to become new spatial objects that elucidate the artist’s personal experiences. These works span the themes of femininity, tradition, and heritage while establishing their own permanence through the medium of bronze. Ridgway juxtaposes the delicacy of the textures of lace and crochet work with the monochromatic and industrial fortitude of metalwork. While some of her works emphasize a reverence for domesticity, Ridgway also uses the translation of knit pieces into bronze sculptures to underscore a disintegration of memory. Ridgway extracts the artisanship of crochet work to develop a history of herself as an artist in the enduring medium of bronze.
Project Description:
I've worked with Linda three times during the time I was at Flatbed tackling multiple large scale monotype projects. Every time she comes in, she brings in bags of materials for us to ink up and her to play with. We've inked up and printed from items such as leaves, flowers, grasses, sticks, and fabric.
