Printmaker set to inspire USD students this week

David Langner, a senior printmaking major and president of the Student Art Association, is a dedicated printmaker with a specialization in the printmaking process of lithography. Langner is currently working on his upcoming thesis exhibition planned for spring 2015. He is also working on a cataloguing project by inventorying the entire collection of lithography stones in the printmaking department.

Printmakers create images on various types of surfaces — wood blocks, linoleum, Plexiglas and slabs of limestone. These surfaces are prepared to accept the ink and then run through a printing press to reproduce the image on paper multiple times.

Langner and I recently talked about his projects and the upcoming visiting artist, Althea Murphy-Price. Murphy-Price also uses lithography as her art-making medium.

While Langner uses more traditional methods of stone lithography, Murphy-Price practices a nontraditional, experimental plate lithography.

This surface is called the “matrix.” Artists like Langner use flat slabs of Bavarian limestone. He describes the process as labor-intensive and romantic. Stone lithography requires a sensitivity to the natural variations within the stone as well as any trace images that may remain from previous images that have been etched onto the surface of the stone.

Murphy-Price, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a nontraditional, contemporary approach to her printmaking process. Modern industry gives artists access to new materials, which can bring alteration to existing traditions and ways of working.

Instead of using a heavy Bavarian limestone slab, which can weigh 50 or more pounds, Murphy-Price uses alluminum printing plates coated with photo sensitive emulsion to create the images for her artwork.

This process allows for the incorporation of mechanical processes such as photography, photo copy and objects themselves. Langner said this process has an immediacy, a spontaneity and the ability for incredible detail.

He said he is enjoying the experience of learning new types of contemporary lithographic processes. His image-making maintains a strong connection to the process of traditional stone lithography and all of the elegance inherent in its challenges and processes.

Althea’s work is a still life, touching on issues of life, death and beauty. The symmetrical composition and vertical use of form, her use of “found object” and choice of subject matter allow space for multiple entrances into the work. Langner’s work speaks of similar ideas, creating a floating, atmospheric space.

Murphy-Price’s work is currently in Gallery 110 in the Fine Arts building. For more information go to University Art Galleries, University of South Dakota on Facebook.

Murphy-Price is the visiting artist at the Art Department Nov. 3 through Nov. 7. This week, she will provide printmaking workshops and work with printmaking students. She will give a presentation about her work and her processes Nov. 5 at 2 p.m. in room 172 in the Warren M. Lee Center for Fine Arts building.