Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood: Painters and Sculptors at Crown Point Press

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Amy Baker Sandback

The text of Ink, Paper, Metal, Wood is equal parts print-media lesson, personal opinion, shop talk, and biography, all imprinted with the author's voice. (If the book had been issued as a print, it might have been classified as "mixed media with hand coloring.") Crown Point is particularly known for the quality of its intaglio printing, but it also offers expertise in photogravure, monotype, and, on occasion, woodcut. Among its more talked-about and controversial issues, in fact, was a series of the latter, commissioned by Crown Point but cut and editioned in Japan, in the time-honored ukiyo-e manner, by Japanese craftsmen - an interchange not previously tried with non-Japanese artists. This is among the projects that Brown discusses, and that she documents with images running from inception to final resolution. There are quotes and personal asides from both participants and critics, and there are very clear explanations of technical procedures. Some of the information is general to printmaking, some particular to an artist, or even to the making of an individual impression. All of it is the next best thing to being there. Brown emphatically stresses that to be successful a fine print must involve not only exacting presswork but a touch of artistic alchemy; as the examples illustrated here prove, at Crown Point both have been in remarkably good supply.

Amy Baker Sandback is an art historian and is currently at work on the catalogue raisonne for Bob Ryland.