Works by Arabas, Avakian, Baker, Batchelor, Bunkley, Carriero, Coffin, DeBerry, Dexheimer, Fearnside, Gilman, Goldberg, Haworth, Hochberg, Hunt, Locklin, Long, McTague-Stock, Meehan, Merlone, Miller, Mills, Odell, Oswald, Partoll, Rosenberg, Smith, Stevens, Swanson, Waimon, Webber, White, Wilk, Wright, Zack, and Zavorskas.

This exhibition was juried by Flo Hatcher, a printmaker with over 25 years of teaching experience. The Monotype Guild of New England is celebrating its 20th anniversary as an institution that promotes the unique print.

A monotype is a one-of-a-kind print pulled from a painting on a non-absorbent plate such as Plexiglas, zinc, copper, or aluminum.  Ink or paint is applied to the plate using a variety of implements including brushes, rollers, cottons swabs or fingertips.  The prepared plate and (often dampened) paper are placed on the press bed and then run through the press, creating a unique print. Sometimes, two or more plates are used as well as several runs through the press to add images or color before the print is considered finished by the artist.

In the halcyon days of the 1960s, the caution was routinely noted in national print competitions that all print mediums were accepted, except monotype.  Printmakers, guided by an elaborate craft demanding attention to detail, technique and tradition, were somewhat hidebound and unwilling to accept what they thought of then as a frivolous technique. This changed with the seminal exhibition Degas Monotypes, shown at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (April 25-June 14, 1968). The exhibit resulted from a Ph.D. dissertation by Eugenia Parry Janis and generated a catalogue raisonné. In the foreword John Coolidge states that “Degas' attitude towards the medium explains a great deal. Monotypes were his most intimate form of expression. They deal with much he successfully kept hidden, much that is unsympathetic to his admirers.”

Thirteen years later, another noteworthy exhibition “The Painterly Print: Monotypes from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century” opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (October 16-December 7, 1980) and at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston ( January 24 to March 22, 1981) and was dedicated to this deceptively simple printmaking process.  This exhibition also produced a significant catalogue that included an article by the New England artist Michael Mazur, “Monotype: An Artist's View.” In his article Mazur states, “Monotype is a painter's medium. Although launched in the print shop, it was born of the painter's imagination and restlessness.” Of the process Mazur writes, “Monotypes are unique impressions of ink transferred to paper from a relatively nonporous sur upon which an image has been painted.” “A “painterly” print is still a print. A great deal of surprise is built into printmaking. Lifting the paper off the printing sur is a tense and revelatory moment.” In 1983 MIT commissioned Mazur to provide a large artwork for a new campus dormitory and he conceived “Wakeby Day/ Wakeby Night”, a monumental monotype triptych measuring more than six by twelve feet, a print dimension unheard of in Degas' time.

Although more intimate in size, thirty-six monotypes and/or monoprints, comprise this 2005 Monotype Guild of New England celebratory anniversary exhibition. MGNE, founded twenty years ago by Cape artist Beverly Edwards, is a regional organization with over 200 artist members. The artworks selected for The Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University represent nuanced impressions in this painterly medium and a dedication to the development of the craft. The images reveal combinations of intaglio and relief, etching and chine collé, ghost or cognate impressions, direct transfer imagery, plates worked in oil or water based inks, and woodcut monoprints, all printed on a variety of papers, permitting the subtlest of expressions and personal narrative ideas. The touch of the individual artist is documented throughout and the exuberant, “revelatory moment” is unleashed.

This spring, thirty-seven years after the Degas exhibition, in “The Boston Printmakers: 2005 North American Print Biennial” exhibition-a venerable institution of its own-of the 217 accepted entries, 14 percent were monotypes or monoprints. Printmakers and jurors have acknowledged the “painterly print”.

Flo Hatcher, Juror
March 25, 2005