Breuer's take on Printmaking

Noah Breuer is up for consideration for the printmaking position at Sac State. He had an artist talk in Mendocino Hall on March 15, 2017. He talked about utilizing printmaking in various ways beyond the traditional ink on paper, delving into his experience with lithography, screen prints, and relief printing. He studied traditional woodblock printing in it's birthplace: Japan. Breuer's process of idea building was from personal material that he would gather and mold into a body of work. For example, he layered screen prints on cut foam core and lithographs of baseball cards to create textures. One of my classmates did not find the compositions clear. He explained that the effect would probably be more meaningful if he used one less color. I agree with him because although he was using image as texture, his main concept got lost in the textures that were created by the layering of multiple colors especially in his baseball prints. Breuer was utilizing the dot pattern layered over collaged litho printed cards plus four to five colors all at once and although the initial idea was interesting, the image does not engage the viewer to look deeper into the piece because there is so much going on.
The interesting fact about his work is that he utilizes digital media in the carving of his plates. Mixing vectorized images carved into the wood with a machine, he layered images and used them in a variety of ways. However, I question whether that is fine art or more commercialized art. Printmaking has always been on that borderline because of the ability to reproduce an image, but they are limited in how many copies they can make before the plate or etch starts to fall apart. Because of the addition of technology, identical plates can be cut and inked again with precision and ease. Although the integrity of the plate may degrade over time, the reproducibility of the plate itself makes it easier to make mass productions of the same piece.

Third row seat for the lecture.

Breuer is hella tall.