The Intimate PrintPrintmakers Network of Southern New England

Dodd Research Center West Corridor
Curator: Roger Crossgrove

Printmaking has long had a strong appeal to visual artists who see their art as something "for the people," as differentiated from that in which a single painting, sculpture or other unique work is customarily found within an individual or group context. Contemporary printmakers and the visual artists have now pulled closer together, and the blurring of the area between the two has produced some of the most exciting visual imagery of our time.

Printmakers, however, like to get together to support one another and to share interests, concerns and discoveries; then to initiate projects that highlight the talents of the individual artist as well as produce a beautiful and unique group effort. Thus it was, in 1982, that a group of regional printmakers joined together, with the help of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, to organize the Printmakers Network of Southern New England.

The Intimate Print, a boxed portfolio of twenty four original prints, is the Network’s second group production, and already it has had four showings in galleries and museums in New England. It will travel to Canada this fall. For this project, the group assigned themselves the technical--and aesthetic--challenge of the technique of chine colle or papier colle. This is the term given the process wherein a thin sheet of paper is printed and mounted simultaneously on a larger and heavier sheet. The members of the Network have been highly creative in their utilization of this technique, whether applied to an historic and traditional technique--the woodcut--or to a contemporary variant--the xerox transfer.