Contemplating Contemporary Art: Crown Point Press

Signage at the bottom of the stairs

The printmaking class' annual visit to Crown Point Press at 20 Hawthorne St in San Francisco was on March 16. Every semester, Professor Mark Emerson takes his printmaking class to visit Crown Point Press, a well established printmaking studio founded by Kathan Brown in 1962. Crown Point invites artists who are not printmakers to work with their printers and experiment with various printing processes for a week. They are also the creators of Magical Secrets, an instructional book on the many different etching processes and the in depth guide on everything you need to know to use them. Famous artists such as Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn worked with Crown Point occasionally. Their pieces can be seen in the gallery from time to time.
The building is an old newspaper facility in the Yerba Buena area. I absolutely love this place! A very welcoming vibe and a peaceful energy that flows throughout the building. Up the winding staircase to the second floor, the door is open and inviting you to step inside where the magic happens. The ceilings are high and the windows are large, flooding daylight into the space. Their gallery is small but the shows are phenomenal showing a variety of ways artists could use the same etching techniques.
We started our field trip with a guided tour from Sasha Baguskas, the editor and publications manager at Crown Point. She explained the history of Crown Point and talked about the processes of prints currently exhibited in their gallery. Usually there aren't many relief prints but this time around there were a few. Focusing mainly on intaglio prints, the discussion was mainly about dry point, aquatint, sugar lift, spit bite, and both hard and soft ground etchings. (I would explain them all but it would take all day.) Baguskas talked about the quality of line that is created through etching that is very different from that of a drawing. She said that Diebenkorn appreciated the velvety quality of the softness of the ink. He collaged different pieces of paper to come up with a composition that read easily
After the tour of the gallery, Baguskas took us on an exclusive tour into the back rooms to the studio space. She explained each room, taking us around until we reached the largest press beds where the printers, Emily York, Sam Carr-Prindle, and Courtney Sennish, were busy inking plates. They were working on a three color photo gravure print. The artists are never working when we visit, so our class examined the inking and printing processes of the printers. I love the thud of the press bed when the plate finishes going through and the plop of the blankets when they systematically throw them over the roller. Sadly my phone ran out of memory before the plop. Next time... Anyways Sennish explained the photo gravure process better than I did in my previous post so check out the video! (hopefully I can get it to work soon)