The Humboldt & District Museum and Gallery was a sanctuary of silence during the linocut and silkscreen printmaking workshops on Feb. 6 and 7.
Both workshops were held at the gallery and hosted by Patrick Bulas, a local artist and sessional lecturer specializing in printmaking at the University of Saskatchewan.
“The workshops went really well. The class was full and we had a good range of people,” said Bulas. “They were enthusiastic and excited to see the final results. Some were a little tentative when they started, but once they got going, it was good.”
The first workshop was on linocut printmaking and was held on Friday from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. It involved sketching an image onto a thin block of soft rubber and then carving out the negative space. Once an image was carved out, an artist simply rolls the ink onto the block, applies a sheet of paper, and voila, the image is transferred to the paper like a stamp.
“It requires a lot of focus, but the motions are repetitive and really quite relaxing. A few participants commented on how calm they felt after the workshop,” said Annah Gullacher from the gallery. “The black and white images they produced have a handmade quality that is very beautiful.”
The second workshop on Saturday was silkscreen printmaking and lasted for six hours.
“Silk screening is more complicated. It’s more of a complicated way to stencil an image, but instead of cutting out stencils from paper, you’re creating an image onto transparencies,” said Bulas. “You’re then exposing those transparencies onto a screen and then the screen becomes a stencil and you force ink through.”
Although it’s difficult to visualize without actually seeing the art in progress, it is capable of many layers and colours and can be used on different materials such as posters, stickers, vinyl, wood, and most popularly, t-shirts. This medium can be particularly challenging for people because it’s hard to picture the final image.
Often, Bulas said this creates a common criticism for the craft. Artists working in this medium can get so caught up in the actual technique of trying to get the perfect colour or the perfect crispness of image that they forget the quality of the image itself. The content of the art is just as important as the technique in creating it.
“We always ignore the content, what the image is, so hopefully people understand that there is a technique, but it also has to balance with content. They have to work together,” said Bulas. “Classes like this help people understand the technique so they can move past it to see what the image is.”
Unfortunately, Bulas also said it’s difficult to try to teach everything people need to know about these art forms in a single class, even if it is six hours long. He’s taking information and techniques that he usually spreads out over the course of a few weeks and trying to condense it into a single class. He said it’s just enough time for him to introduce a concept, get “confused looks on their faces,” and then send them off to start trying it. Nevertheless, after 19 years of experience, Bulas said he was ready to see it through.
“The silkscreen participants found the process to be quite involved, but were for the opportunity to try such a complex form of art,” said Gullacher. “It’s not something you can easily set up in your own home, so to have the opportunity to try something like this through the Saskatchewan Arts Board Creative Partnerships: Explore and Develop grant was really remarkable.”
Despite the normally high costs of attending these types of art classes, all of the workshops are free and are an opportunity for residents to try out various forms of art media. Upcoming will be workshops focused on painting, embroidery, Mauritian fabric painting, and more.
According to Gullacher, three of the artist partners are local: Mel Bolen, Karen Holden and Sooraya Durgahee. Another artist partner, Grant McConnell teaches art classes at St. Peter’s College.
