Printmaking Highlights from 2017

by Christopher O'Flaherty
Lunch Money Print was founded in October of 2016 and has been active for a little over a year. In this past year Chris O'Flaherty and Mark Donne have worked with over 20 artists with works ranging from woodcuts and drypoint to silkscreens and photographs.  LMP is a highly curated online gallery, and frame shop looking to change how people buy art. Here is a look at a few of our artworks over the past year.
Enjoy the video!
 

Highlights!

1. Jeffrey Hutchinson Fay Prints a Giant Woodcut with BIGINK

Jeffrey's oil paintings, woodcuts, and etchings depict small town scenes across New England. This spring the artist began carving a giant 4' woodcut to be printed with Lyell Castonguay director of BIG INK. BIG INK is an organization that facilitates large woodblock printing through events across the United States. In June, Lunch Money Print went up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to print with Jeffrey and BIGINK at 3S Artspace.
This print is a representation of The Gay Head Light, a lighthouse on the western most point in Martha's Vineyard built in 1799. Recently, The Gay Head Lighthouse Committee worked in conjunction with the town of Aquinnah and the Martha Vineyard island community to raise approximately $3.5 million to relocate the lighthouse about 129 feet (39 m) from its former location.
 

2. Alexander Puz Translates his Oil Painting into Print

Alex has been working on a series of oil paintings looking to study and play with spacial tensions and contradictions in his conceptual paintings.  In his recent collaboration he translated this series into a linocut print.
Looking back on the recent modernists and conceptual artists who came before, Alex restricts himself to using simple elements of color, a gradient, simple geometric shapes, and a swiggle line to build his images. Furthering his aesthetic within the modernism he created his own manifesto on painting with this list below.
Towards a Non-subjectivist Painting Practice
  1. Paintings are wall hung, pigment bearing surfaces
  2. Painting is the representation of 3-Dimensional space on a 2-Dimensional support
  3. A painting is looked in to, not at, around, or through; Paintings are frontal portals
  4. Painting does not include 3-Dimensional attachments, sculptural elements or relief
  5. Painting does not need to be plugged in or have electrical elements
  6. Paintings are self referential; maximum clarity of intent determines discursive achievement
  7. Edges, Scale, Value, and lapping define space and priority
  8. Systems develop painting and vice versa (concept = motif)
  9. Painting size determines audience thus scope (murals = social, easel size = individual)
  10. Paintings are rapidly, analytically comprehended; they are instantaneously and intuitively understood
  11. Painting is the widest frame for exploration ideas through art [due to its historically and culturally understood status as art]
  12. The elements of painting are color, texture, space, value and line. The qualifiers for these elements of painting require them to be indexical, symbolic and a signal (it is what is, represents what it is, and indicates what it is)
  13. Paintings occur when witnessed therefore the experience of a painting is ahistorical and non-narrative. Paintings describe a spatiotemporal situation.
  14. Painting is intellectual (not emotional) labor and are executed not improvised. [this is due to a paintings status as autonomous object, paintings are not placeholders for the subjective psychology of the artist]
  15. Painting is fundamentally abstract and non referential, dealing with ontological elements assembled to create novel situations of thought

 3. Ariana Prado Creates LMP's first drypoint

 Ariana Prado, a Bronx based artist, depicts a culture poised between New York City and Mexico by drawing on inspiration of memories and photography from her family. Food and family portraits are her most common subjects and wonderfully describe a place, her life, which she graciously invites us into.

"La Casa de Quiote" is a drypoint, a form of intaglio printmaking, created by scratching into a metal plate to create a design. Ink is then put on the plate, and then wiped away. Where the scratching indented the plate, ink gets stuck, and then is transferred to paper on an etching press.

4. Guimi You and LMP Translate Her Oil Painting into a Reduction Woodcut

Guimi You is from Seoul, Korea, and lives and works in New York. She collaborated with us on a new reduction woodcut based off of one of her paintings of a playground. A Reduction woodcut is a relief printing process that uses one block of wood, with sections carved away and printed between each state.  The result is a surface that is layered with color and very harmonious because it is all from the same design. Here are the two side by side (oil on left, woodcut on right).

5. Diego Espaillat Interprets his Studio 

In this woodcut, Diego carved directly from life to portray a view of his art studio in Old Lyme, CT, looking for relationships between objects to play with perception in this somewhat distorted notion of reality. Diego who primarily works in sculpture and installation carefully arranged both found objects and sculptures to activate his studio space through an abstract planar understanding of space. Leaving the majority of the block black, he accentuates the objects through bold contrast, and flat shapes of pattern.  
Diego tends to collect keep and reuse found objects and pieces from other sculptures including debris, scrap wood, and household objects. In this piece, objects include seemingly distorted hangers, a lawn chair intersecting with a television, an easel, and a mask made of plaster. Creating prints and drawings from the arrangements is a way for him to document and think about his arrangements.

Thank you to all the artists who have worked with us this past year!

Adam Niklewicz, Alex Puz, Ariana Prado, Christopher O'Flaherty, Daniel Eugene, Deborah Weiss, Guimi You, Helen Cantrell, Jason Toy, Jeffrey Hutchinson Fay, Julia DePinto, John O'Donnell, Kevin Corrado, Kieran Tiere Thomas, LeeAnn Dicicco, Magdalena Pawlowski, Meredith Miller, Michael Angelis, Nina Jordan, Robert DiMatteo, Stefan Batista

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