Engage in an investigation of the potentials of image making through print media and ideas of “the multiple.” Formal, conceptual, and technical possibilities are explored through demonstrations, making, critiques, research, visiting artist presentations, and exhibitions. With a focus on layered color, we create matrices in a variety of print media and continue to layer transparent and opaque color to make both editioned and unique prints. This back-and-forth between fixed matrices and improvisational methods serves as a structure for the course. This class is designed to allow you to explore multiple iterations of an idea and to become acquainted with a variety of media and formal approaches, while exploring a range of content possibilities.

This travel based course that will explore the concept of a BOAT as relief print, functional form, and fine art object. Taking place in remote Southeast Utah on the Yestermorrow Design School Campus, students will live and work alongside the San Juan River to conceptualize what is means to create a wooden MacKenzie drift boat that is both a printable matrix and technical whitewater craft. The course will be divided into three parts: design and carving of the hulls, construction of the boats themselves, and finally a multi-day aquatic journey with the boats built during the course. Students will leave leave the course with a knowledge of relief printmaking, basic boatbuilding skills, and expedition planning expertise. No experience with printmaking, boatbuilding, or river expeditions is necessary, just a mindset of openness and exploration in all aspects of intellectual and experiential learning.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1609-1669) is known as an experimental innovator in print media, who advanced the etching medium and sparked new appreciations for prints as an art form both in his time and after. This class will use the study of the themes, processes, and formal devices in Rembrandt’s prints as a foundation to explore the potentials of image making through print media. Projects are designed to allow students to investigate multiple iterations of an idea and to become acquainted with a variety of media and formal approaches while exploring a range of content possibilities. Students will learn how working within formal, technical, and material limitations opens a wide range of possibilities. A question we will be attempting to answer is 'Why make prints?' Phil Sanders, author of Prints and Their Makers, talks about how print media can be used not only to reproduce something that already exists but to 'create a world that did not exist before'. Rembrandt's work will be a touchpoint for this question, as will how Rembrandt's prints influenced artists/printmakers who came after him (including contemporary artists such as Nicole Eisenman and Howard Hodgkin).