Foreword

Alchemy for Everyone^{© 2010}

Dr. Carol Pulin

Bonny Lhotka’s transfer prints are absolutely magnificent. That’s a direct visual observation. Her subjects drawn from the natural world, from garden views to the close-up of a particular plant or the configuration of a flower, turn into richly detailed artworks of sophisticated beauty enhanced by their clear, modern presentation. Glittery postmodern architectural structures become gorgeous odes to the interplay of light. The relationship between the picture and its expression seems perfect every time. Bonny uses her response to the scene, her attention to memories that affect its emotional meaning, to determine the composition. Her excitement in developing contemporary ways to communicate that impression shows. The intellectual meaning reveals links to past and present, the progression of time, and a particular, defined location. Her combinations of traditional and experimental techniques, of illusion (the printed image) and reality (the art object), balance perfectly.

I’m a print curator. Why am I so passionate about these artworks based largely on photographic imagery? It isn’t just that the images have been manipulated in ways that change the expression from capturing and reproducing a specific delimited segment of the real world into an expression of the artist’s view of it as reflected in the continuum of her own life and work. For me, it’s inextricably bound up with symbolic and conceptual theories about the way our minds process content, transferring spontaneous impressions onto the background of previous experiences, creating the intricately layered prints that are our memories. Similarly, Bonny’s reworking of her photographic files reveals her printmaker’s aesthetic—the mark-making, the quality of line, the shading and modeling, the graphic expression of values. Add the complexity of layers of translucent and opaque color to control the compositional emphasis, and you’ll begin to see the reasons why I’m immediately drawn to these works, and why I come back to them again and again. But the most significant reason is how the transfer—for me, the essential quality of all printmaking—visibly alters the imagery, style, form, and meaning, the synthesis that creates a successful work of art. Bonny’s creation of new transfer techniques allows the distinctive characteristics of printmaking to enrich both drawn and photographic imagery, both traditional and digital, with a wonderfully expanded range of materials, and the results really do expand the idea of print.

Computer languages evolved quickly from binary code to a graphical interface, and output from magnetic tape and punch cards to pen plotters capturing diagrams. Dot matrix, laser, and inkjet printers soon followed with color in dye and pigment inks. Jagged, pointillist blocks of color resolved into smaller and smaller pixels until the ink droplets became too fine to see. Yet artists, curators, and connoisseurs who saw the potential for computers in printmaking still complained about the sameness of the slick surface on the only useable papers. We missed the toothy textures of hand-made sheets and the swirling fibers of Oriental papers. We missed the ink standing up from the incised lines of an intaglio plate, floating over the surface from a litho, flooded through a screen, pressed deeply below the surface by a relief block. We missed the grain of the wood itself pressing its texture into the sheet; the contrast between areas flattened to silky smooth and the velvet of ink absorbed into the pricked fibers from a drypoint or mezzotint. Relatively recently, inkjet printers improved to accept somewhat thicker and rougher paper and other types of sheets. Now, Bonny shows you processes to transfer ink to a full range of papers using release films and gels, and what’s more, she has also developed techniques and environmentally-safe chemistry to let printmakers transfer imagery to porous and nonporous materials of almost any shape.

No wonder artists want to know, “How did she do that?” It’s alchemy, the construction of all complex entities from the simplest parts. Yes, the ancient alchemists sought to identify the most basic elements (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water) and explain their transformation into all the materials of the world. Later alchemists who tried to turn lead into gold kept their work secret, knowing that gold would still glitter but not be as valuable if easy to come by. Printmakers, on the other hand, are among the most sharing people in the world—right up there with gardeners, who readily share seeds that will magically transform into a whole world of plants. Bonny not only answers those people who ask about her techniques and materials, she actively seeks to disseminate information. She knows that no two printmakers will interpret an image in the same way, so that each person using these methods will create notably different works of art. And that’s the fun part, seeing what different artists do with these media, how their personalities and styles alter their viewpoint and how they use transfer techniques to infuse those interpretations into their prints.

Some of you come to this book looking for a way to create on paper (or cloth, wood, metal, plastic, etc.) a print that actually has the characteristics you already see in your mind’s eye. Other artists want the techniques to spark their imagination and inspire them to see their pictures in new ways. In either case, remember that the greatest joys in printmaking come from letting the printmaking process itself inform the work. Each method brings with it a different set of qualities, a resonance with the materials that changes the appearance of marks and lines, colors, textures, even the reflectivity of light. Each affects the additive layers differently, requires compromises that strengthen the composition or expand the options. Each offers ways to turn a straight “realistic” photograph into your own personal commentary, or change a drawing from a depiction of shapes into an exploration of the qualities of marks. The more you think of the transfer as an essential aspect of the creation of the artwork, the more you think like a printmaker, the more you’ll transform the captured image into your own individual, freely translated expression of personal and universal values.

So now it’s up to you as artists. To learn the craft so that you can count on these techniques in your toolbox, and in fact be ready to experiment with them to invent new methods that allow your images to appear as you imagine them. You need to consider which type of transfer will modify your initial photograph to focus attention on the reflective surface that first caught your eye, or echo the shimmer by incorporating mirror or metal. Altering a grainy texture by manipulating the resolution can play just right against a surface that is actually smoother or rougher, waxy or pitted. Or maybe it’s a question of echoing the deep rich color of a backlit leaf by transferring ink to a transparent substrate, then adding softly translucent or darkly opaque layers. And then there’s the whole realm of atmospheric effects on the dry, chalky surface of fresco. The combinations of printed ink and actual textures are endless, allowing the subject and object to interact in the real world.

I’m eager to see the variety of expression, the pairing of message and imagery, the synergy of ideas and materials, that each individual artist will develop using these exciting printmaking techniques.

About Dr. Carol Pulin

Dr. Pulin is director of the American Print Alliance, a consortium of non-profit printmakers’ councils in the United States and Canada. She is also editor of Contemporary Impressions, the journal of the American Print Alliance. Dr. Pulin has previously published articles and written about Bonny Lhotka and the other artists in the Digital Atelier, Dorothy Simpson Krause and Karin Schminke; see the index for Contemporary Impressions at www.PrintAlliance.org.