Ana Rita
Linocut and chine collé, 16" x 20"
Printed on a bookbinding press in 2003 at FBAUL, Lisbon, Portugal

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Drawing and Printmaking, 2002 to 2005

I WAS PRIVILEGED, as a mature student of 38, to be able to study drawing, painting and printmaking along with theory and art history from 2002 to 2005, at the University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Art (FBAUL, Faculdade de Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa). The school is located in an old quarter in the heart of Lisbon known as Chiado, a romantic district and former hang out for intellectuals and poets such as Fernando Pessoa, struggling to be true to their craft and vision under fascism. The school itself is housed in a former 16th century monastery.

MY DAYS WERE LONG, arriving on an early train––an hour each way to downtown Lisbon from Sintra––to get a quiet start to the day before other students arrived. I engaged myself more than content to do studio work, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and theory for often for 8 to 9 hours a day at the university and book work in the evening. Yet it was a love for drawn lines, that led me into new ways of thinking. I found I was thinking with the pencil as I acquired a new visual language, in almost every way one learns a foreign language. I worked for about 12 hours every week, for 2 years, in classes drawing from a live model with professor Artur Ramos, experimenting with all kinds of drawing material, always before a large upright drawing board, standing like a fencer. Artur was one of the few professors who managed to be true to academic rigor in drawing of the human figure and portraiture, having a certain niave disdain for much of the sloppiness in contemporary art, while at the same time being both academic and contemporary.

I LEARNED a great deal from him about seeing, observation, looking and making corresponding interpretative marks on paper. I drew everywhere and as often as I could, filled sketchbooks and generated reams of “large scale” drawings [by that I mean to say drawings thirty inches or larger in length]. Not so large by some standards, but not twelve inch sketchbooks. The scale required me to draw with my body and not my wrist alone.

AT LENGTH, THIS PASSION FOR LINE and drawing was commuted to printmaking in lino, woodcut, etching and aquatint, stone lithography and silkscreen as well as variations in between. These portraits here are a selection of works that show a variety of printmaking techniques.

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