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I want to tell everyone about the wonderful summer I had while teaching at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica Venezia. Indiana University has a great program in Printmaking / Book Arts. The students and I enjoyed our summer making art and seeing the sights of Venice!

I thought I would tell you about the exciting exhibition previously displayed at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica by Sam Winston.

The London-based typographic artist is blurring the boundaries of text and words in his series of artist books, drawings, and constructed prints. Winston uses text, less for its content, and more for its function. He turns letters on their sides, removes and collages text in search of its artistic potential. As a viewer, the difficulty of reading in circles and through distortions forces one to visualizes singular characters as a unified whole. Fascinated with language, Winston’s work bridges a gap between art, graphic design, storytelling and craft.

Winston gave an artist lecture during his visit to the Scuola.
"I always wanted to be a writer, but I realized that you don't always have to write with words. When I began to develop an understanding of design I realized that you can write with visual language....I used typography to create graphics, but because I wasn't selling anything people called it art." -Winston

The exhibition consist of some very large (some as large as 44"x30") constructed works on paper, Giclay prints, and ink drawings. I was personally fascinated by the repetitious cut-outs and mark making!

For more check out his sight… http://www.samwinston.com/Work/Kal

This post begins a new series, written in no particular order, that describes things that printmakers, quite generally, like. Things we like knowing, using, working with, having around, saying, and learning about.

Things Printmakers Like – Post 1

Margins

Margins help determine the value of stamps, shapes of leaves, boundaries of farmland and countries, and the shape of continents. The margin is hard to ignore in a print; it surrounds the image, providing a space without from the work’s content (contained within the margins), but also a space in-between the print's image and the work’s actual physical surroundings. The margin is a well-considered and indispensable space– it is where the printed image meets the world. Some printmakers exploit the margins to create a context unique to the rest of the work, and some prints utilize their margins as a space for punctuation, framing and holding a print’s images.

Printmaking has been defined as a marginalized art media in recent art historical terms, but many printmakers today recognize the power that lies within margins themselves. Margins define the liminal space exactly where the image touches the world surrounding it, and exactly where the world embraces the graphic image. Margins exist at and within both sides of this space, thereby simultaneously defining each space as reliant upon and independent from each other– an important position to be in indeed.