The Pressing Matters of Printmaking

Last week, the Range Visiting Artist series put on a two talks and a panel featuring visiting artist James Bailey as well as a few others. On November 10th, I got to attend the panel that took place in the Terrain building downtown. The vibe of this event was a lot calmer than Terrain, and was definitely not as overwhelming. Along with beer and wine, the atmosphere served up a very chill scene, and began and ended with the members of the audience free to try their hand at printmaking. There were a total of 5 artists that made up the panel, and were spurred to discuss certain topics by a local museum curator named Karen. 

The event, officially named Pressing Matters: Symposium on Printmaking started at 6:30, but the panel began at 7. The artists began by introducing themselves, telling the crowd where they are from, and how they first got into printmaking. Though all 5 of the artists are printmakers, their styles and pieces were all so very different from each other. The names of all 5 artists are Chris Tyllia, James Bailey, Mary Farrell, Kevin Haas, and Chris Dreyer. Out of all of the printmakers though, my favorite would have to be James Bailey. 


James Bailey, or better known as Jim, is from Missoula, Montana and currently teaches at the University of Montana. Jim started out as a painter, and gradually made the transition over to printmaking and has really developed new and interesting processes. He claims that he has a love-hate relationship with printmaking, but truly creates some interesting pieces. My favorite pieces of Jim's are his Babel Series. These pieces are really visually interesting and contain high contrasts between bright colors and blacks as well as a lot of lines. The piece to the left is titled AZ, and is my favorite because of all of the elements within the piece and the brightness of the blue against the black. 

The panel ended with Karen allowing questions from the audience to be asked. Many asked questions such as how does one continue printmaking once they are out of school and do not have access to printmaking machinery or why is printmaking important? The answers to all of these questions were really informative and well thought out, each artists contributing relevant information. I think the most fascinating part about this panel was viewing the works that the artists had created and just how different each one was. James Bailey even told a story about in one of the classes that he teaches in Montana, they used a steamroller to print onto used (yuck) sheets from the college. The unusual process brought laughs from the crowd as well as spurred my imagination as to how in the world one could actually use a steamroller in making art. 

After the panel session had come to an end, a few of my classmates and I got to watch a photocopy type of printmaking. One could choose objects to photocopy, creating one image, and then with special markers, one could transfer the image to another piece of paper. It did not exactly turn out every time, but it was pretty cool to watch. This was a really interesting panel to attend, and gave me, as well the community of Spokane, a little glimpse into the printmaking world, one that I am not really familiar with.