Brian Shure, master printer and director of Anderson Ranch Editions, has spent over 50 years mastering his craft — making art, teaching, and working in print shops all over the world — but has never experienced anything Anderson Ranch, where he’s worked for the past four years and lives with his wife and two children.
A self-proclaimed luddite, he still prints everything by hand in a downstairs studio at the ranch, welcoming artists from all over the world who come to Snowmass to experience life at Anderson Ranch and specifically work with him.
“We get artists here for all different kinds of reasons,” he said. “It’s a very specific place with a specific feeling different from any other print publishing program. It takes them out of their comfort zone. And it’s scary, it’s something new, but it changes the way they think about their work, and it helps their work evolve in ways that it wouldn’t if they just stayed in their studio.”
Printmaking has always incorporated cutting-edge technology with traditional skills, and the ranch encourages artists to combine traditional print processes with the newest digital technology.
Shure’s job is to guide them through the process and use his technical expertise to bring their creative vision to life.
“Part of my job is to try and just be supportive and to keep them within the limitations of what it’s possible for me to do,” he said. “I could say, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea; that’s really big,’ and then I’m not able to do it in the end. That’s not helpful at all. Sometimes when things go well, they do something they had no idea they were going to do, and I ended up doing something I didn’t think we could do. So that’s what it’s about.”
Friday night, Anderson Ranch is holding a public reception for “Hot off the Press,” an exhibition of recently completed Anderson Ranch Editions projects by artists including John Buck, Elinor Carucci, Elliott Hundley, Robert Kushner, Steve Locke, Hiroki Morinoue, Shana and Robert ParkeHarrison, Simonette Quamina, Clare Rojas, and Tom Sachs.
“This show is really about these different artists and their work, their ideas, and the program. One of the ways that it’s unique is that there’s a lot of different mediums in use in this group,” said Shure.
And that’s precisely what makes printmaking exciting. Just within this exhibit, artists who work in different mediums — from drawing, paint, and wood block to lithograph, sculpture, and photography — are represented.
One artist whose work from the ranch will be featured in “Hot off the Press” is New York-based Steve Locke, “whose paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations live at the intersections of portraiture, identity, and modernism.” The prints are a continuation of two important bodies of work within Locke’s practice, his critically acclaimed “Homage to the Auction Block” and “cruisers” series.
“These works marry the logic of Josef Albers to our shared violent history,” Locke said. “By interjecting a schematic auction block into the color matrices of the Albers formula for ‘Homage to the Square,’ my work seeks to reconcile these histories by organizing modernist ideals around the shape that made them possible.”
He didn’t come to the ranch as a resident but was invited by Liz Ferrill — artistic director of painting, drawing, and printmaking; chair of the artists-in-residence program; chair of critical dialog — and Shure as a visiting artist. Both had been familiar with his work and thought a collaboration between Locke and Shure was a great idea.
Turns out, they were right.
“Brian is a genius,” said Locke. “The best thing about working with him is his patience and intuition. As we were working on the ‘Black Line Series,’ we were able to develop other ideas. So a project that was supposed to be one print turned into multiple explorations of printmaking media on the theme of the auction block. A great printmaker is able to get inside the artist’s head and actually see the processes that will make the image that exists in the artist’s mind.”
The fruit of that collaboration is a series of four screenprints, two aquatints, and two embossings, where Locke continues his exploration of modernism and re-envisioning Josef A. Albers’s 1950–1976 “Homage to the Square” series with an ominous charge. “Homage to the Auction Block” abstracts a slave auction block to its most basic geometric silhouette — reflecting Locke’s belief that “the basic Modernist form is indeed the slave auction block.”
“It was a joy to work with Steve Locke on the most recent project we completed,” said Shure. “We totally connected. We had a constant dialogue about the images and about the various ways they could be read. I learned to examine even these (in every case but the ‘Cruisers’) very minimal non-representational images in more ways and from more viewpoints than I had ever understood possible before. Art helps us to see — and not just visually but through these visual signs, to see inside ourselves how we relate to the world and to the people around us.”
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Read full article at aspentimes.com.
