Arts This Week: Children’s Printmaking at Kluge-Ruhe
By Sage Tanguay
Sage Tanguay 00:05
You’re listening to WTJU Charlottesville. The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is hosting a Children’s Printmaking Workshop on Saturday, January 18th from 11am to 1pm. For Arts This Week, we spoke to the workshop’s instructor, Josef Beery.
Josef Beery 00:23
My name is Josef Beery, and I am a printmaker. I do most of my printmaking at the Center for the Book, which is part of the Virginia Humanities and we have studios and classroom space in the old Jefferson High School downtown Charlottesville. The Kluge-Ruhe is a fabulous museum of indigenous art from Australia. They are doing a show about Indigenous artists in Australia and printmaking. And as part of their outreach, they asked me to come in and introduce children to printmaking.
It’s a very kind of unusual combination, because you wouldn’t normally associate printmaking with what had been called the Aboriginal artists of Australia, who are known most often for their dot paintings, for their dream work, for their decorative pattern making on didgeridoos and other kinds of very natural objects. It’s a very important history cultural tradition – but there was no printmaking. Printmaking is a western idea and also an Asian idea, but the idea of using printing presses was a western idea which evolved about the time a little bit before Gutenberg in the 15th century.
So what happened at Kluge-Ruhe is that a fabulous man in Australia named Basil Hall, he used his skills to help Indigenous artists in Australia become print makers. Very complicated because it’s it’s a real cultural mash up of European printing technology and Australian Indigenous art traditions, which really have almost nothing in common. But the Australian Government had come to value the arts tradition of the indigenous people there, which is probably the most important cultural tradition in the world, because the indigenous people of Australia go back 65,000 years. So it’s the longest continuous art tradition in the world. But it remained very much the same, not evolving much. Technology was not a big part of it, but mark making, and the association of mark making with meaning coming from the spirit world, the dream world, or from the natural world as as interpreted by the indigenous peoples, was very important.
So when Basil Hall decided to interface with these communities, he took advantage of a relationship that the government of Australia had created in recognizing the importance of art in the indigenous communities. They had established and supported art centers in these indigenous communities, and at that time, they sort of discovered acrylic painting, and a lot of stuff was happening with the colors from their traditions, which came from soil based colors, ochres and basil, decided to hop on that. And what he did is he started going to these art centers and encouraging these artists to create plates which could then be taken back to his big city studios and used to create prints. And the plates that were being created were intaglio plates, which are plates which are etched with acid. How would indigenous people do this? Well, a plate which was a piece of metal, most often, piece of copper, would be covered with a ground, and the artist would make scratches into that ground. The ground is soft, and scratching is a very traditional form of mark making for the indigenous people of Australia. So it was a very natural connection. But then he would take these plates back to the city and etch them with acid and then print them on big, modern intaglio presses, staying in touch the entire time with the original artists, talking to them about how the prints were going to be made and what colors to use and it was very successful.
And he did this for over 20 years. He created over 1300 editions. So that’s what Basil did. And he recently decided that he had all these proofs of the prints that he had done – 1300 proofs, and he decided to donate them to the Kluge-Ruhe Museum, which is a phenomenal gift. The museum is rather small in terms of gallery space, and so they exhibit a few at a time. And right now, they have a wonderful show called shifting ground, which closes on March 3rd in this show are some fabulous relief prints and some lithographs, and also some collagraphs, which I highly recommend that everybody go see, because they’re fabulous.
And the Kluge-Ruhe asked me to come and demonstrate collagraph print making to kids and have them have the opportunity to do their own collagraph printmaking. Collagraph printmaking comes from the word collage, and it is an incredibly accessible form of printmaking, and it’s as simple as taking a sheet of cardboard and gluing different objects to it. Because you’re gluing objects to it, those objects have a three dimensional presence or a relief, and you can ink that collage that you’ve created by gluing different objects down to the cardboard, and then put a piece of paper on top of it, and rub that piece of paper down with the palm of your hand or with a spoon, and then pull the paper up, and you have what’s called a collagraph.
So I have used this technique with children and a basic printing press creating simple collages quickly with young children. I use what’s called craft foam, and they can create fantastical creations, and then ink those up and print them on simple paper using a press that I created called the BookBeetle Press, which is a little desktop representation of essentially the Gutenberg-style press. And so it introduces students to not only collagraph printmaking, but the history of the European printmaking going through back through the Gutenberg Press, which was a screw press. That’s what I’m doing this Saturday at Kluge-Ruhe and that’s what I’ll be doing again, several more times at the Center for the Book through a program called AlphaBuzz, sponsored by the Virginia Humanities. The workshop this Saturday is from 11 until 1. You go to the Kluge-Ruhe website to sign up. If it’s already filled, I suggest that you call and tell them that you want to come anyway. And the only thing I would remark upon is that children are required to have adults with them.
Sage Tanguay 08:01
The class is open to children aged 6 to 13, and registration is required. More information and registration can be found at kluge-ruhe.org. For WTJU, I’m Sage Tanguay.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
