Commemorating the Life of Irwin Hollander, Master Printer

To start off 2019, I decided to recognize the achievements of Irwin Hollander, who died on Nov. 16, 2018, in Brooklyn. He was 90. Like the rest of us inked up brethren Hollander was a printmaker, but he decided early on in his career to become a Master Printer. For those uninitiated, a Master Printer is a person who is trained in all manner of printmaking technical skills. He/she then goes on to run a printmaking workshop, or contract independently with other print shops to print images for other artists who are not printmakers. That type of business has been around for a few hundred years, and has permitted artists in other media the opportunity to make original printed editions. Hollander worked with some of the best artists of the 20th century, and he devotedly taught printmaking in his later years. The man’s contributions to the medium are noteworthy so I wanted to share a little of the life and the prints he printed for other artists….

Hollander started out as an artist who developed a reputation as a commercial master printer. He was an important part of the revival of fine art printing in the 1960s that became popular in the United States. He often said that his main goal was “to serve artists.”

Irwin Hollander was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1927 to Henry and Ida (Burak) Hollander. His father was a taxi driver, and his mother worked in the garment industry. The family eventually moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Hollander dropped out of school at 14 but he later attended the School of Industrial Art, (now the High School of Art and Design), and studied fashion illustration, life drawing and photography at Washington Irving High School. By 1945 he was taking photographs for advertisements at R. H. Macy’s.

Hollander’s artistic training assisted him in the Army in 1946, while he served in Guam with a photography technical unit. After leaving the Army, he attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School, the Esmeralda National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking in Mexico City, and the Art Students League in New York City.

In 1955, he married Nina Serser, a social worker. They moved to California, settling in San Diego where Hollander worked for a commercial printing company and fell in with the city’s art scene. The company agreed to let him use their equipment at night to work with artists.

That year, Hollander became acquainted with June Wayne, whose newly opened Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles would play a major role in introducing American artists to printmaking, and in training master printers. Within a year he was the first master printer trained at Tamarind.

In 1964, he returned to New York and opened a print workshop in a studio that had been vacated by Philip Pavia. Hollander later rented the first floor of the building as a display area and gallery. The first print his workshop published was by Leonard Baskin. Later on he developed a partnership with Fred Genis, a Dutch master printer.

He was best known for working with Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, convincing them that their gestural style would adapt well to printmaking. Hollander’s workshop also published portfolios and prints by Pierre Alechinsky, John Cage, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner James MacGarrell, Louise Nevelson, Claes Oldenburg and Saul Steinberg.

After he closed Hollander’s Workshop in 1972, he taught printmaking at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He later moved to Wells Bridge, NY, and spent the rest of his career on his own art. Rest In Peace…..

John Armstrong Wields His Alternative Path through Printmaking

John Armstrong is a master printer and printmaker(there is a difference, folks)who hails originally from Laurel MT, but has resided in Phoenix, AZ for many years.  He will be one of a dozen invited artists from across the United States to participate in MONOPRINT 2013, which is being held May 31-June 6, at University of Wisconsin at Steven's Point. http://www.uwsp.edu/art-design/monoprint/I first met Armstrong at the first MONOPRINT symposium in 2009. Over the course of a week, I watched as Armstrong banded together some mysterious materials, mixed some of them together, waved his magic printing hands over the plates and voila!, there were prints all over the place. Honestly, they sprung up like rabbits jumping out of a magician's hat. With a little bit more cutting and collage, he'd amassed quite a striking group of works. 

The thing about the symposium, is that people from the community are welcome to come into the shop and see artists at work. During the week when I worked alongside Armstrong, he was quite the teacher, inviting people to try some of the techniques he was doing and extended the collaborative part of printmaking to include their suggestions and collages with his work. It made the experience more enjoyable for them and de-mystified the printing process. Armstrong's a generous instructor and gives his time and energy wholeheartedly. His inventiveness in the printmaking field is endless and the work is pretty incredible, too.

Armstrong was raised in a large family in Montana, and since receiving his MFA from University of Montana, he's been settled in the southwest in Phoenix for some time. Throughout his varied career, Armstrong's always brought integrity, creativity and energy to his projects, whether it be in museum administration, or in art education, exhibit design, or curating a private/corporate art colleciton. He and his wife, Joan Prior, operate Armstrong-Prior, Inc, a multi-facted business in the arts. Through it, he has worked as a master printer with several internationally acclaimed artists, including Rudy Autio, Jun Kaneko, Matin Mull and Don Reitz.

As for Armstrong's imagrey, I am enamored with it to the extent he breaks from traditional printing techniques, and doesn't fuss about cutting and collaging the shapes which have familial ties with the work of artists Arshile Gorky and Willem DeKooning. His lines ebb and flow throughout the compositions, and they embrace the edges of his shapes, which are sometimes bold with flat color, or transclucent letting co-exist underlayers of line and shape. I head a video once where Armstrong was talkng about his work, and the jazz music playing in the background was a perfect match for the way these images sing. His prints can be incredibly spatial or tightly composed, but in any case one is pleasantly surprised at the large and small aspects of his images. I was not able to get more images of Armstrong's work to better illustrate my point, but you can find more of his work at johnarmstrongartist.wix.com/art where one can also find examples of his paintings, sculpture and prints. Overall, one can see his sensitivity for color and line and Nature. If you are able to be in the Stevens Point area next week, drop by and see Armstrong and the rest of the artists working at the MONOPRINT 2013 symposium. You might even get to work with Armstrong on one of his pieces......

Armstrong now works in his own studio, often collaborating with other artists. Here is a video where Armstrong talks about his work. http://vimeo.com/55539874

Contact: john@armstrong-prior.com Tel: 602-253-5784    

The Mezzo-Manic Prints of Carol Wax

Man, oh Man, OH MAN! I mean Really, my inked up comrades, take a Good look! The images you are about to experience are about the BEST there are to see, and the artist (Carol Wax) has been setting the print world on its ears with these masterpieces. High praise you might say, but honestly, when Wax started exhibiting these prints, people's eyes popped, and one could hear the collective swearing of printmakers the world over, saying, "Damn, how does she DO it?" Well, we printmakers know 'how' she does the process, and it's hard and difficult and most would say its a pain in the a--, but it is a process that has historically, and continues to, yield rich, velvety black tones like no other. Technique aside, because I don't need to delve into that, nor will I, Wax's prints are simply dazzling.

Some obvious things that stand out in Wax's work are the cool, slick, gleam of her subjects; their rich detail and crisp lines. Wax would appear to treat them with a loving and reverent care, as an antique collector would for his/her possessions. She repeatedly produces astoundingly wonderful and complex compositions that invite our eyes to meander through them like one would through Cezanne's highly structured paintings or the Ab Ex brushstrokes of Willem DeKooning. They arrest our attention, but what they do next is transport us to another era, another period where the invention of machines and their design was an art. 

"My mezzotints of prosaic objects reflect my experience of the ordinary as extraordinary. By manipulating light, shadows, repetitive patterns, and skewing perspectives, I strive to reveal the anima in the inanimate."

Well, that's an understament if ever there was one. Wax take objects from a by-gone era of what look like the 1930s and 1940s. Some are portrayed frontally like icons of communication. The mechanics of other objects are mostly splayed out  in some state of dis-assembly. The gears and parts are strewen about, perfectly filling the picture plane. Further, Wax balances the light and shadows pouring over the objects in an engaging and tantalising manner. To be honest, the shadows activate the negative space, caressing the subjects. We'd just like to be able to touch them. 

The effect of Wax's works makes one feels like they're in an old black and white film, a noir, or a Garbo flick, or the film My Man Friday. The flash, the substance of those old objects that transport us to another place and time are all the more interesting when one considers that Wax is describing older mechanisms of communication via an even older tool of visual communication - (the mezzotint rocker). 

One wonders if Wax has a particular fascination for this era since she has spent so much time invested in these items, but in truth it doesn't matter. Who cares? These antiques are ageless and in perfect condition. Wax's choice of subject makes a decided departure from what one normally sees of this process, and for that we are grateful. As she once said in an interview, she understood that realistic images weren't necessarily seen as creative or conceptual, yet she boldly stated that there was a lot of printmaking that wasn't  creative anyway. Sadly, this is true.

I do like the way the artist puts a little chaos into a seemingly inanimate object - as in the case below, the typewriter's ribbon has gone haywire and is completely untangled from its spool. She makes the chaos fun. These images are sleek, sexy and invoke out tactile sensibilities. Granted her choice of subject is far from the norm associated with the process, but that is the beauty of printmaking, it's legacy evolves as do we, and investigative printmakers like Wax have helped propel an older method of making inked up images to give them a fresh look. 

And then, just when we think Wax is the mezzo-manic master of black and white imagery, she shocks us with this colorfully refined gem below. Can't you just hear that thing's keys go clack, clack, clack? I don't tire from looking at her work. She has made a clear and decisive impression upon our field, and we can marvel at what she's achieved. Here's to hoping more of our brethren are inspired to achieve something new with our own work after savouring hers.

Biography:

Carol Wax was born in New York City,1953. She attended the Manhattan School of Music, and earned a Bachelor of Music Degree in 1975 majoring in Flute Performance. She continued as a professional musician until 1980.

In the mid 1970s, she took printmaking courses at the Lake Placid School of Art, and then studied printmaking at the Pratt Graphics Center in New York City.  She looked at the work of Philip Pearlstein and gravitated to the historical process of mezzotint. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Wax  conducted research into historical printmaking techniques while continuing to develop her own work.  She spent several years learning and piecing together the history o her process until in 1990, Harry N. Abrams published The Mezzotint: History and Technique.

Wax has taught printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design,  the State University of New York at New Paltz and at New Tork University, and Montclair State University

In 2002, Wax moved to upstate New York where she continues to work.

Awards:
2011 - Head Juror, First International Mezzotint Festival, Ekaterinberg Museum of Fine Arts, Ekaterinberg,  Russia
2009 -  Individual Support Grant, Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation
2004 - Concordia Career Advancement Award
2003 - Artist's Fellowship Grant , New York Foundation for the Arts 
1994 - Louise Nevelson Award for Excellence in Printmaking from the American Academy of Ats and Letters
The MacDowell Colony Residency,  New Hampshire
1996 - designed a system for attaching adjustable weights to the mezzotint rocker, the first improvement to rocker design in over three hundred years.

Collections:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Boston and New York Public Libraries

Contact: 914 788 5329 or cwax@earthlink.net

Karla Hackenmiller's "Liminal" Works sparkle at the MAPC Show

Karla Hakenmiller's two prints called "Liminal Twist" and "Liminal Passing" are two prints whose linear interweaving and overlap at first remind us of balls of unraveling yarn, or parts of knitting/sewing gone awry. the pulling apart of some weaving or knotting, to fraying interconnected lines is organic and reminds me of some of the work of Eva Hesse.

Similarly, the complexity of her lines draw the viewer into her 'internal' spaces, for they also seem to be about somethings you would see in a petrie dish or snorkeling underwater. There is life within the line and it engages and entwines the viewer to be a part of the wonder of them. In fact, one could become similarly mesmerized by her line as one does when looking at Willem DeKooning's "Excavation" painting for any length of time. One is only mercifully saved from becoming completely immersed with Hackenmiller's maze through the small breaths of open space - what's Not covered in linear ecstasy.

The scale of her work is intimate, and again, it draws the viewer to it like a magnet. One wants to look deeply into her spaces and pour over them like reading a good book.

I have to say that upon seeing Hackenmiller's website www.karlahackenmiller.com, I am more drawn to her color work,  where her sensitive layers are even more wondrous. I do not profess knowledge of her subject matter, but I enjoy the journey looking throughout her 'twists' and 'passing'.