Customer Reviews

The Original Print: Understanding Technique in Contemporary Fine Printmaking

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Byrne provides a good introduction to the four major groups of printing techniques -- relief (woodblock, linocut, etc.), intaglio (etching, aquatint, engraving, and so on), lithography and screenprinting -- briefly describing their history, mechanics and characteristic effects. If you are interested in fine prints, this book will give you the vocabulary, although you really have to see some of the techniques in action to understand how they work.

Text is a small portion of the book, which is largely devoted to contemporary prints themselves, with commentary from some of the printers. The book is *not* a general survey of contemporary fine prints, however. Instead, the book seems to have been conceived as a collaboration between Guild.com (an Internet retailer of fine and decorative art) and several of the contemporary fine print publishers who make their work available through Guild (as well as through more traditional distribution channels). Printmakers who do not sell through Guild are not represented, and artists who work on their own (typically in woodblock or linocut, which do not require a press) are similarly excluded. Even so, many of the finest printmakers in the US are included, and the quality and variety of the work displayed is stunning. Color reproduction is quite good, although not perfect.

The mass production of this text serves as an aesthetic nurturing for the starving art enthusiasts of our time. Clement Greenberg and Susan Sontag would vehemently disapprove. Byrne sheds light on the multi-valent reality of the collaborative process. Printmaking has never been so sexy. I highly recommend this book.