Sean Starwars is a printmaker living and working in Laurel, Mississippi. He is a relief printmaking artist specializing in woodcut printmaking. He is also a member of the Outlaw Printmakers.
Sean Starwars is a printmaker living and working in Laurel, Mississippi. He is a relief printmaking artist specializing in woodcut printmaking. He is also a member of the Outlaw Printmakers.
Sean Starwars BA from Old Dominion University in 1996 and his MFA from Louisiana State University in 1999. On his name "At first it amused him to have professionals address him as "Mr. Starwars," but he soon discovered it was also a great marketing tool for his woodcuts. "My real last name is pretty common," he said. "This is a way I could stand out." [1]
Starwars is associated with a movement within contemporary American printmaking known as "Outlaw printmaking". The Outlaw Printmakers are a group that includes Tom Huck, Richard Mock, Dennis Mcnett, Sue Coe, Bill Fick, Michael Barnes, and Cannonball Press.
Starwars' original "Country Croc" woodcut was pictured as the example of the reductive approach to relief printmaking in Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials & Processes [2] authored by Bill Fick and Beth Grabowski.
During 2011, Sean Starwars participated in a project called One Woodcut a Week in which he completed one 30"x20" woodcut a week for an entire year. [3]
Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types of material. As a method of printmaking, it is, along with engraving, the most important technique for old master prints, and remains in wide use today. In a number of modern variants such as microfabrication etching and photochemical milling, it is a crucial technique in modern technology, including circuit boards.
Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed technique, rather than a photographic reproduction of a visual artwork which would be printed using an electronic machine ; however, there is some cross-over between traditional and digital printmaking, including risograph.
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that the artist cuts away carry no ink, while characters or images at surface level carry the ink to produce the print. The block is cut along the wood grain. The surface is covered with ink by rolling over the surface with an ink-covered roller (brayer), leaving ink upon the flat surface but not in the non-printing areas.
Linocut, also known as lino print, lino printing or linoleum art, is a printmaking technique, a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum is used for a relief surface. A design is cut into the linoleum surface with a sharp knife, V-shaped chisel or gouge, with the raised (uncarved) areas representing a reversal of the parts to show printed. The linoleum sheet is inked with a roller, and then impressed onto paper or fabric. The actual printing can be done by hand or with a printing press.
Relief printing is a family of printing methods where a printing block, plate or matrix, which has had ink applied to its non-recessed surface, is brought into contact with paper. The non-recessed surface will leave ink on the paper, whereas the recessed areas will not. A printing press may not be needed, as the back of the paper can be rubbed or pressed by hand with a simple tool such as a brayer or roller. In contrast, in intaglio printing, the recessed areas are printed.
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Intaglio is the family of printing and printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface and the incised line or sunken area holds the ink. It is the direct opposite of a relief print where the parts of the matrix that make the image stand above the main surface.
Viscosity printing is a multi-color printmaking technique that incorporates principles of relief printing and intaglio printing. It was pioneered by Stanley William Hayter.
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition. The term remains current in the art trade, and there is no easy alternative in English to distinguish the works of "fine art" produced in printmaking from the vast range of decorative, utilitarian and popular prints that grew rapidly alongside the artistic print from the 15th century onwards. Fifteenth-century prints are sufficiently rare that they are classed as old master prints even if they are of crude or merely workmanlike artistic quality. A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term.
Edmond Casarella was an American printmaker, painter, and sculptor based in the New York metropolitan area. He developed the innovative use of a layered cardboard printing matrix that could be carved like a woodcut, enabling the inexpensive creation of large-scale works.
Bill Fick is a printmaker living and working in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Fick is the director of Cockeyed Press, which specializes in the production of satirical linocut prints and book production. He is also a member of the Outlaw Printmakers. Fick, along with Beth Grabowski authored a book, Printmaking: A Complete Guide to Materials & Processes in 2009.
Somnath Hore (1921-2006) was an Indian sculptor and printmaker. His sketches, sculptures and prints were a reaction to major historical crises and events of 20th century Bengal, such as the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Tebhaga movement. He was a recipient of the Indian civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.
Tom Huck, also spelled Hück,, is an American printmaker best known for his large-scale satirical woodcuts. He lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri, where he runs his own press, Evil Prints. He is a regular contributor to BLAB! of Fantagraphics Books. His work is influenced by Albrecht Dürer, José Guadalupe Posada, R. Crumb, and Honoré Daumier. Huck's illustrations have appeared in publications such as The Village Voice, The Riverfront Times, and the Minneapolis City Pages.
The Outlaws of Printmaking, also known as "The Outlaws" and "Outlaw Printmakers" are a collective of printmaking artists that exists internationally. The idea of "Outlaw Printmakers" formed from a show in New York at Big Cat Gallery in 2000. Tony Fitzpatrick, the owner of the Big Cat Press which is associated with the gallery, decided to call a show there "Outlaw Printmaking" to reflect attitudes of the printmakers involved in a non-academic approach to prints. As pointed out by Sean Starwars, the Southern Graphic Council print conference was happening at the same time as that show in NYC across the water in New Jersey. A handful of artists from the conference attended the show.). At that conference the core group now known as the Outlaw Printmakers formed, adopting the name from the show and continuing their own events, happenings and shows outside of the academic norm. The core members are Bill Fick, Tom Huck, The Hancock Brothers, Sean Star Wars, Dennis McNett and Cannonball Press. Many of the core artists associated with the movement cite the printmaker/artist Richard Mock as a primary influence. Mock's political and social narrative prints appeared in the New York Times op-ed pages for more than a decade in the 1980s and early 1990s. Later the group grew to include Carlos Hernandez, Drive By Press, Ryan O'Malley, Artemio Rodriguez, Kathryn Polk, Erica Walker, Derrick Riley, and Julia Curran.
Clare Romano (1922–2017) was an internationally known American printmaker and painter with works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and other major collections. As an advocate, innovator, and educator in the field of printmaking, Romano has co-authored in collaboration with her husband, John Ross, The Complete Printmaker (1972), The Complete Collagraph (1980), and several other printmaking manuals that have become standard texts for universities. They founded their High Tide Press for artists books in 1991.
Althea Murphy-Price is an American artist who specializes in printmaking, and Professor of Art at University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her work "contemplates the power of hair as a signifier of cultural self-identity."
In printmaking, surface tone, or surface-tone, is produced by deliberately or accidentally not wiping all the ink off the surface of the printing plate, so that parts of the image have a light tone from the film of ink left. Tone in printmaking meaning areas of continuous colour, as opposed to the linear marks made by an engraved or drawn line. The technique can be used with all the intaglio printmaking techniques, of which the most important are engraving, etching, drypoint, mezzotint and aquatint. It requires individual attention on the press before each impression is printed, and is mostly used by artists who print their own plates, such as Rembrandt, "the first master of this art", who made great use of it.
Sylvia Solochek Walters is an American artist and educator. She has produced drawings, paintings and collage works in her career, but is best known for complex woodcut prints created through the "reduction and stencil" process. Her work combines elements of realist, decorative and formalist art, flat and illusionistic space, and varied patterning and textures. She has largely focused on portraits, still lifes and domestic interiors, and collage-like combinations of personal symbolism—concerns that writers often align with early feminist art.
Osmeivy Ortega Pacheco is a Cuban visual artist based in Havana, Cuba. He works primarily in large-scale, monochromatic lithographs featuring the human body and animals.
Lisa Bulawsky is a contemporary artist known for her works on paper, temporary public art, and printmaking.