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INSPIRED BY THE GREAT OUTDOORS Screenprint artist captures beauty in N.H. Landscapes |
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By Mark Dagostino GLOBE CORRESPONDENT Reprinted from The Boston Sunday Globe- August 9,1998 New
Hampshire Weekly, Arts and People DOVER- Go ahead.Explain "serigraphy." Stumped? That's understandable. For some reason, it seems the serigraph falls into the category of art terms that are rarely explained to the general public - unless you're fortunate enough to run into an artist like William Mitchell. And, fortunately, he's easy to run into: Whether it was at the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen's Annual Fair last week, or coming up at the Sandwich League shop on Saturday, Mitchell is always out demonstrating his craft and trying to get others just as hooked on serigraphy as he is. For "serigraphy" is simply the artistic term for screenprinting - the same kind of printing technique that puts designs on T-shirts in the mall. It's fun It's relatively inexpensive. It's the kind of thing kids can do. But in seeing Mitchell's work, one understands why artists are quick to disassociate themselves from the connotations that simple screenprinted T-shirts carry. By squeegeeing inks onto paper, by hand, through painstakingly prepared fabric screens, Mitchell creates wonderfully colorful, collectable, original works of art. After 20 years in the field, his process is so refined, and his vision of the New Hampshire landscape so clear, that the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen picked his works to be shown in all of its stores as a special traveling exhibit this year. There's even a chance that you or someone you know is carrying Mitchell's work around in a pocket right now: Bank of New Hampshire commissioned his purple-mountained "View From Indian Head" for use on its debit card, which means thousands of New Hampshirites own a Mitchell and don't even know it. Still, chances are, they like it. "I think people relate to my work in several ways," Mitchell says. "They relate to it as something they've seen, someplace they're fond of. And I hope when they look at my work they're reminded of the beauty of the New Hampshire landscape." Mitchell sees that beauty when he's out hiking and skiing with his family. He captures it on film and in memory, and paints studies of the landscapes with acrylics before setting about the printmaking process. He decides ahead of time how many prints he will make - usually he focuses on runs of fewer than 100. He figures out how many colors it will take to produce the image - he has used up to 23 colors in a single print. And then, he sets about laying down one color at a time, layer upon layer, squeezing the ink through very fine fabric (usually polyester though it's still called "silkscreening") onto high quality paper, and blocking the areas where he doesn't want ink to fall by painting liquid glues onto the fabric. "When you do a silkscreen, it's really printing with a stencil-an envolved stencil," he says. So envolved, that his method of brushing on glues to make "stencils" give his prints a soft almost impressionistic painterly quality. And the colors, which he mixes himself, are deep, rich and lush. "I'm drawn to silkscreen because you can lay down large areas of color," Mitchell says. "I like to think of it as the painter's printmaking process." Mitchell was first drawn to this artform - which dates back to printing with vegetable dyes on banana-leaf screens in the Fiji Islands some 2,50O years ago - as an art major at Oneonta-in upstate New York. Inspired by Josef Albers' series of colored squares within squares, and the popular and intricate works of Andy Warhol and Richard Estes, respectively, Mitchell continued his study of serigraphy for a year at the Boston Museum School. In the city, Mitchell concentrated on cars and buildings - letting individual automobiles' personalities shine through their bright colors on otherwise drab streets. But in 1984, after landing a job in the prepress area of the University of New Hampshire's Printing Services and moving to Dover with his new wife, Mary Malone, his focus quickly turned to the land around him. "I just take pleasure in being outside and looking around, and I think that's what my work relays to people" he says. Out and about with Malone and the couples twin sons Matthew and Michael, now 13, Mitchell has brought home stunning familiar views: of Mount Washington from Bretton Woods, an August sunset on Mount Sunapee, or the flowers in Portsmouth Prescott Park. His special commissioned work "Autumn in New Hampshire" which was created for the league's traveling exhibit could be almost any New Hampshire landscape with its rusty oranges and greens, stark white birches and its shadowy hills under puffy white clouds. But it is, for him and for those who have been there, a particular view from Loon Mountain. For those who want to bring those views home with them too, of course, the wonderful thing about prints is the fact that they cost so little compared to paintings. Even though all of Mitchell's serigraphs are original, hand-made works of art,they sell in a range between $50 and $300. "Prints are accessible to people," Mitchell says ,"where, as if people go out and buy a painting it's so serious. Prints are on paper. People can handle them. And there are a lot of print collectors out there." Enough that Mitchell has finally been able to move his workspace out from a spare bedroom in his family's comfortable home on a country road, and into an attached studio, which he built last year. It's a space that holds all of his work, from early cityscapes to the New Hampshire motifs that allowed him to be juried into the league in 1991, to the latest, abstract expressionist-influenced forest he is putting together via a giant ,study pinned up on one wall. "I haven't done a building in a print in a long time," he says. And it will probably be a long time before he does another. Landscapes, of this landscape, suit him and his serigraphs just fine. |