ENCAUSTIC PRINTMAKING – EXPLANATION BY CLAIRE ROSENFELD

LITHOGRAPHY DEMO WITH JEBAH BAUM

PHOTOGRAPHS by ELLA BAUM OF APRIL 5, 2025 OPENING OF MANIFEST IMAGES PLUS AN INSTALLATION VIDEO.

CYANOTYPE DEMO WITH CHRISTINA MAILE

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April 5 – April 20, 2025
Opening Reception Saturday April 5, 6-8 pm

Westbeth Gallery
55 Bethune Street, New York, NY 10014
Gallery Hours: Wed-Sun, 1- 6pm

Featured Artists: Jebah Baum, Daniel Berlin, Cathy Cone, Dale Emmart, Gwen Fabricant,
Jonathan Fabricant, Christina Maile, Claire Rosenfeld

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In printmaking there is always an intermediate step, a gestational period during which an image is filtered through a process and intervened uponThe act of making prints is to repeatedly bear witness and experience the coinciding. manifestations of intention and imagination.The images printmakers create are declarations of arrival! With each new impression they announce themselves and reflect the various methods by which they are made.

Manifest Images is a group show with works by eight mid-career artists for whom printmaking is a vital part of their studio practice. This exhibition celebrates the breadth of printmaking media and some of the myriad ways that artists harness them to produce their work.The artists in this exhibit are unified in their efforts to expand the field of contemporary printmaking through personal experimentation and creative exploration.Printmaking, like photography, quickly evolved from its egalitarian origins as a method of reproduction and fine artists have enthusiastically embraced it for its unique expressive possibilities.
Several artists in this exhibition use printmaking techniques to create monoprints in oil or encaustics, or include collaged, digitally printed elements within their painted surfaces.Some exploit the raw physicality of applying inks to paper under pressure via lithographic, wood or linoleum matrices, while others extract the finest detail from sensitized gravure plates to produce images with extraordinary tonal range.

Click images to enlarge

Daniel Berlin
monoprint

Daniel Berlin My monotypes are executed in several passes through the press, building up layers as I go. When I’m working on these prints, I try to check-in and do a little sweeping out of preconceptions. A buoyant beginner’s mind emerges and a freshness that emphasizes direct experience. In this exhibit I am presenting several groupings of monotypes, starting with those printed at Bud Shark’s Lithography in Colorado to those made recently at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY.

Cathy Cone
photogravure

Cathy Cone My practice of making and developing the printed image is activated by its materiality. I’m interested in the various states of inked matrices and their combinations and intersections in the pursuit of form. Photography guides me to a deeper understanding as I celebrate the possibility of transformation through the exploration of the printing plate, digital file, or negative, leading towards a new situation.

Jonathan Fabricant
relief print

Jonathan Fabricant In my prints I utilize grids, geometric shapes, patterns, directional movement, color, and figure ground relationships. I work with the static matrix of the carved block, pushing against repetition to create a series of unique images. I am drawn to relief printing because it has an inherent imprecision and funkiness which gives my geometric shapes character and room to breathe.

Jebah Baum “Landscape”
lithograph

Jebah Baum My lithographs are hand printed from multiple polyester plates with oil based inks on an American French Tool etching press. The plates are relatively inexpensive, which allows me the freedom to work directly in a painterly manner. I begin with sketches and develop ideas in reaction to the unfolding visual narratives that emerge before me. My images are thus spontaneous, gestural and expressive. Their horizontality evokes themes of landscape and a quality of restrained expansiveness.

Christina Maile “Grandmother’s Gods”
cyanotype

Christina Maile Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that creates blue tinted images by drawing with light and shadow. In preparing for this exhibit I realized that it might be capable of perfectly manifesting the non-visible and imaginary world into which recent experience had thrust me. I also feel strongly about the external world and will contrast these more personal images with giclee collages of war and desolation.

Gwen Fabricant “Fern”
inkjet print and collage

Gwen FabricantIn the works for this exhibition, I have juxtaposed a mechanical form of reproduction with an intensely handmade one. Physical organic material is collaged over laser-printed images of plants I placed on a scanner and photographed. These are very different processes, but both are ways of exploring the physical reality of our earthly nature and its visual expression.

Dale Emmart relief print artist book

Dale Emmart My works in this exhibition are relief prints made with a straightforward reduction technique, generating pages for the scroll, accordion, and larger stab binding book forms. Unlike the fine craft of printmaking with accurate registration of color plates and controlled crisp edges, the prints in these works are blunt, hand-rubbed, overlapped, and more gestural than graphic. Closer to drawing, the mishaps and unexpected artifacts of ink residue on intended figure-ground relationships construct these prints and book objects.

Claire Rosenfeld ink and encaustic monotype collage

Claire Rosenfeld I work in both ink and encaustic monotypes, sometimes painting into the prints, or collaging parts of them with drawings or watercolor images. By exploring nature in transition and the relationship of figures, still, moving and gesturing within the landscape, I attempt to evoke a sense of mystery in familiar settings.