Visual Arts at ASU

The Visual Arts At ASU

Article by Dean Smith / Designed by W. Randall Irvine You are there, part of the tense drama in a sunlit Italian Renaissance studio-there with the master artist and his assistants, peering intently at a nearly completed creation. With you are carelessly garbed apprentices and students, blending colorful pigments and inks. Pungent scents and delightful textures add to the magic of the creative miracle.

It's difficult to realize this is Arizona, not Italy-and the year 1985. Yet, you are about to witness the birth of exquisite ancient art in the Visual Arts Research Institute, a unique collaborative venture in the widely acclaimed School of Art at Arizona State University.

Now the cast is assembled: master printer Joseph Segura, director Leonard Lehrer, craftsmen from down the hall, curious faculty, and always a clutch of spellbound students.

Wax crayon image. Flat, two hundred pound lithographic stone. Paper crafted by hand under the direction of John Risseeuw. Quickly, seven color impressions are transferred to the paper, completing a work soon to be enjoyed in prestigious galleries and collectors' drawing rooms.

Today's creation is a lithograph in the Print Research Facility, one of three centers in the Visual Arts Research Institute. Tomorrow, another of the centers-the Photography Collaborative Facility-may be on center stage, producing one of the images that have brought master photographer Mark Klett wide acclaim. On another day the Pyracantha Press, directed by Risseeuw, will unveil a superbly fashioned art book.This is artistic collaboration at its finest, a collaboration that breaks down the artificial barriers of media and gives artists untrammeled freedom.

"Unique" may be a cliché, but it's the only really accurate term for this institute. Unique means one of a kind. Here one soon becomes enchanted with the melding of skill, taste, instruction, technical research, and creativity.

"It was in 1977 that we set out to establish a department that was unlike any other in academia," explains Dr. Lehrer, a world-renowned maker of fine art prints. "Jules Heller, who is dean of ASU's College of Fine Arts and author of distinguished texts on both printmaking and papermaking, played an importantrole. So did Rudy Turk, director of the University Art Collections, and Hugh Broadley of the Art History faculty.

After each separate color plate has been used in the proofing process, an assistant carefully dries the plate and adds a protective coating of gum arabic (LEFT). Each impression of each color for each print takes about six or seven minutes to lay down. For a run of fifty finished prints, each with six colors, requires a minimum of thirty working hours.

"We wanted a professional, creative art environment in an academic setting. With such a facility, we could invite noted artists from around the world, as well as our own faculty, to come and create original works. At the same time, they would lecture, exchange knowledge, and work with students."

That's how it all began.

The first center to begin operation was the Print Research Facility. Its founders started with only an academic charter, but they soon added two presses and some private financing. Then the university found funds to employ an expert in printmaking techniques - a master printer. Talented Joseph Segura was lured away from a highly regarded studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was given the resources to start translating the dreams of artists into fine art prints.

The sometimes tedious tasks involved in producing lithographs, photographs, or books are frequently leavened by humor at the ASU Visual Arts Research Facility. Humor also finds its way into some of the works produced, as in Four Name Changes, One Hundred Years, by R. E. Gasowski (RIGHT). This lithograph, 20 by 15-inches, retells the history of ASU with nostalgia and visual wit.

Lehrer and his colleagues then brought in Risseeuw to establish the Pyracantha Press and Klett to add a vital dimension to the institute with his Photography Collaborative Facility.

Risseeuw's unusual collection of skills-typographer, printer, paper-maker, and book designer-enabled him to build a highly respected art book facility in less than five years. He has been able to instill a new appreciation of his media in the minds of participating artists and students, and to produce art books such as the beautiful 1984 edition of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, which is bringing new stature to the Pyracantha Press.

Klett has succeeded in establishing a new level of understanding of photography as an art form, and encouraging visiting artists to explore its possibilities more extensively.

It was in December, 1981, that the Phoenix Art Museum hosted the first major exhibit of Print Research Facility creativity. By that time, some thirty artists had come to lecture, learn, and produce prints to add to the growing collection.

They found they could work in any of the four major print media: planographic (lithographs), intaglio (engravings or etchings), stencil (silkscreens) or relief (woodcuts and other raised surfaces).

Today a really creative spirit can conceive and bring into being his or her own art prints, perhaps enhancing them with exotic photographic and typographic techniques, and then print them on paper the artist has made by hand in ASU's paper mill.

It's possible to go even farther toward the genesis of art, as a Casa Grande artist has demonstrated. He grows cotton on his farm and has donated a bale of it to the papermaking facility, planning to create his own art works on paper madefrom fibers he grew himself.

Further technical research is planned to enable the crafting of papers from such native Arizona fibers as yucca, agave, and palm. These papers quite possibly will find their way into some future collaboration here.

The list of nearly a hundred participating artists in the Institute's program is an impressive one. It includes Robert McCall, Fritz Scholder, Ruth Weisberg, Tony Delap, James McGarrell, Walter Askin, and Deborah Remington-all well-known Americans. Among the foreign artists have been W. P. Eberhard Eggers of West Germany and Derek Hirst of Great Britain, both superior talents.

Each of the prints in a limited edition (thirty is a common number) is an individual work of art. Each is numbered and signed by the artist, and each bears the distinctive "chop mark" of the printer.

Most sell readily, at prices ranging from $250 to $700 per print. The Institute keeps several prints, along with the drawings and progressive proofs made in producing them, principally for teaching and archival purposes. Some may be sold to support Institute programs.

Many of us have never held a book such as this Pyracantha Press production of William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (LEFT). Type was band set, letter by letter, by the Press staff, a procedure that fell out of common use before the turn of the century. The paper was band pressed, folio by folio; the lithographs (TOP, and RIGHT) were drawn by ASU Fine Arts Department Chairman Leonard Lebrer, and printed at the Print Research Facility. Typographic ornaments (TOP, LEFT) were drawn by John Risseeuw, director of the Press, who also designed and printed the book (with the assistance of Colleen Oakes). Printing was done one page at a time on letterpress. Only 120 copies of the book were made. Venus and Adonis is 111/8 by 81/2 by 7/8 inches in size. Each band-numbered copy is valued at 225 dollars.

Visiting artists, who pay nothing, find their too-brief involvement with the Institute an exhilarating experience. Florida artist Robert Fichter speaks enthusiastically about the relation between artist and master printer: "It's Rachmaninoff conferring with Ormandy," he says, "the creator and the interpreter, joining talents to produce something neither could do alone."

To Segura, the art print is a medium worthy of dedicated devotion. "The first thing I tell a painter or sculptor," he says, "is to look beyond his accustomed work and create a fine print. The greatest artists of all time made superb prints-Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, and many others. "It's as if a poet who writes in Italian wishes to produce a poem in English. I help him interpret, to think in new terms, to express in another language." The fashioning of a fine art print comes both from flashes of genius and from careful planning and guidance by experts in the nuances of the medium. Robert McCall, for example, is a worldrenowned artist and the foremost name in aerospace art. But he needed instruction in the mysteries of printmaking techniques. Drawing with litho crayons on stone or aluminum plates, using a specialized press to lay down one color at a time on fine paper, requires unusual skills. Segura has helped many artists to develop these skills, and those of other print media as well. For the record, it's not a one-way learning process, either. "I get new insights, and often practical information, from each artist who comes our way," says Segura. "Our students and faculty find the interchange of ideas and insights to be a rich learning experience." Both visitors and ASU faculty artists sometimes find the Institute's resources a bit overwhelming. Some litho stones, for example, weigh as much as a football lineman, measure twenty-four by thirtysix by three-and-one-half inches and cost as much as 1500 dollars each. Fortunately, such stones can be used again and again, unlike the one-shot aluminum plates.

Facilities are available for many other creative efforts-tools for etching and engraving, materials and instruction for making woodcuts, the specialized equipment of the silkscreen artist. There are endless creative possibilities in the laboratory of the Photography Collaborative Facility. And there are infinite roads to artistic interpretation in the type cases, the presses, and the paper processors of the Pyracantha Press.

"It's a wonderful experience," says Fichter, who returned for a second tour. "I can synthesize media hereget Mark Klett to achieve a nineteenth century look with an albumen photo processdevise typographic touches with John Risseeuw-try new print techniques with Joe Segura. Whatever your mind can conceive, you can figure a way to do it here."

Ruth Weisberg, a visiting artist who chairs the School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California, has written in glowing terms of the collaborative approach at ASU. Klett helped her to gain a heightened appreciation of photographs as art works, and showed her how photography can portray the figure in action.

Klett has introduced visiting artists to such modern processes as dye transfer printing, which achieves a vividness not seen in other color printing techniques. He is equally at home with 120-year-old photography secrets, many of which are as effective today as they were in the dawn of the craft.

Risseeuw is every bit as persuasive as his colleagues in the Institute. He exhorts students and visiting artists alike to use imaginative typography and individually tailored papers in their creations. And when the time comes to collect an artist's work in a fine portfolio, Risseeuw helps put together memorable combinations of layout, printing, typesetting, and binding techniques.

Truly, the Visual Arts Research Institute offers a banquet of artistic delicacies for all who come to feast at the groaning board. Artists are selected for invitation in several ways: by faculty recommendation, by peer referral, and also by formal submission of proposals for new collaborative projects.

“We try to attract artists of national reputation,” explains Lehrer, “but what's more important to us is a person who is excited by this kind of experience and is willing to share expertise and insights.” The Institute has won national recognition through shows in major American museums, and through its program of traveling exhibits. One happy result of this exposure has been recent funding by the National Endowment for the Arts to bring six more nationally recognized artists to the institute. The dollars from such grants are welcome, of course, but the recognition by such a prestigious agency may be even more important to the future of the university program.

It's not surprising that the fame of the Institute has spread to Europe. A prime example is that of the E. A. Quensen Printing Company of Lamspringe, West Germany, which sent one of its talented young printers, Hans Rudorf, to learn at the Print Research Facility in the fall of 1980. Herr Rudorf worked side by side with Segura and Jeffrey Sippel, a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree at Arizona State University, for two productive months.

Sippel then was appointed to a one-year term as master printer for the E. A. Quensen Lithography Workshop, and helped establish it as one of the great art print shops of Europe. Rudorf has since succeeded Sippel as master printer at the Quensen Workshop and is building a formidable reputation in his craft. As in the Renaissance art studios, the student has gone on to become the master, and his students are winning their own fame.

There is a satisfying grass roots democracy in this venerable craft-a kind of “art for the common man” motivation that is a powerful driving force. As Dean Heller expressed it in his book, Print-making Today, “The feudal-like patronage of the great print collectors of the past is giving way to the democratic patronage of many small print collectors of the present. As compared with other works of art that are purchased by the few for many dollars, prints are purchased by the many for few dollars.” Lehrer delights in snatching precious moments from his administrative duties to immerse himself in his own projects. His delicate lithographs, and more recently his photo interpretations, rank with the best output of the program.

“This collaborative activity is what art should be: challenging, exciting, and deeply satisfying,” Lehrer declares with infectious enthusiasm. “We set out to create a department that was one of a kind in the academic world, and we've succeeded to an extent which nobody could have imagined.” What's more, the Renaissance studio concept is spawning new ideas every day, taking off in unexpected directions, and expanding its influence into the art world like ripples on a glassy pool. The best, moreover, is certainly yet to come.