A prerequisite for my degree in painting from the University of Minnesota was a printmaking class. Taught by Universal Limited Art Editions master printer Zigmunds Priede, it proved a life changing experience. Priede offered the idea that the printed image could be a limitless horizon, capable of possessing power equal to any painting or sculpture.

 

After college I didn’t have a studio, but I still had a key to the campus art building, and during the summer and fall of 1976 my routine was to work surreptitiously through the night on one of the school’s large Charles Brand presses.

 

This practice held until I moved to New York, then working at Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop on 17th Street. Through the Workshop I received a Jerome Foundation grant in 1982, and shortly thereafter was able to get my own press. I began exhibiting and publishing prints with the John Szoke Gallery in Soho, during which time my conception of printmaking rapidly expanded.

 

Many of my prints became three dimensional and kinetic, and commissions included forty free-hanging works for the Internal Revenue Service headquarters, an array of sculptural kite-like prints for the lobby of the Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston, and a 26’ x 52’ print for the Pittsburgh Penguins arena.

 

In 2015 I received a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant for a portfolio project called “The Shipwrecked Voices.” Since then the work has continued to push the boundaries of printmaking in the search for a beautiful and compelling object.