Printmaking gets little respect, but that’s starting to change.

Just ask Gretchen Schermerhorn.

“I think in general, prints still have a stigma attached to them — that they’re not as precious or as valuable as paintings and sculpture,” the Tempe artist says. “For one, they’re works on paper. And works on paper always have this lower appeal — a lower value than works on canvas. But I think that’s changing. I see a lot more people that are starting to collect prints.”

That may be because the definition of a print is evolving.

Take her piece “Business Suit 2004” for example, a life-sized garment that Schermerhorn stitched together from paper that she printed with repeating images of $100 bills and growing boys.

“Ten years ago, people (in the print world) would have said my ‘Suit’ wasn’t a print because it’s original (instead of being part of a print run),” Schermerhorn says. “And I use spray paint, for example, to paint all my paper a certain color rather than white. So I’m already starting with a color. And that would be a big no-no.”

Schermerhorn and other contemporary printmakers are pushing the boundaries of the art form. Some of this work can be seen in the Mesa Art Center’s current exhibit, “Transferred: The Contemporary Art of Printmaking.”

It features prints by eight local and 30 national artists and takes a comprehensive look at different printmaking techniques, from many-stage processes like lithography and etching — which involve chemical treatments and acid — to simpler forms, such as woodcut and engraving.

The subjects and styles on display are as diverse as the techniques used to create them. The pieces range from realistic works like Wilfred Loring’s aquatint, “Hung Out To Dry” — which depicts a nostalgic backyard scene where sheets, hanging on a clothesline, twist in the wind — to Melissa Haviland’s whimsical, symbolic wood engraving/screen print, “Goddess.”

Three-dimensional works — not usually associated with printmaking — are also included. Karolyn Snarr’s, installation piece, “Our Daily Tea,” features rows of tea cups inside a square shelving unit that looks like a giant shadowbox. On each porcelain cup, the Mesa artist printed hands signing words — they resemble the precise illustrations in an American Sign Language primer.

Because so many different techniques are showcased, the Mesa Arts Center not only provides a booklet describing each piece, but offers a three-page printout of the most used printmaking techniques.

“A lot of people look at the work and think it’s a painting,” says Daniel Britton, who lives in Chandler and teaches lithography and monotype at ASU.

Each print requires a lot of behind-the-scenes work. To create his monotype “Hound,” Britton first painted the image on a clear, plastic plate with slow-drying, oil based inks. A sheet of paper was then laid on top and it was run through a press. For every color of ink that went into the print, a new plate had to be made.

“And that particular print, I believe, there were four plates: red, yellow, blue and a dark brown,” Britton says.
Unlike other types of printmaking, the end result of a monotype is a single image: an original, one-of-a-kind print.
So if a monotype only yields one copy, why not just make a painting or drawing?

“There’s a certain intensity to the color that differentiates it from a lot of other media. Printing inks have a lot more pigment than oil paint, for example, so the richness of the color is very attractive,” Britton says. “There’s a certain immediacy to it — in terms of the monoprint anyway. If it’s done well, there’s a really beautiful, homogenous unity of the image and the surface of the paper. It’s like they’re one.”

But unlike monotypes (and one-of-a-kind pieces like Schermerhorn’s “Suit”), most printing techniques offer an advantage over other mediums.

“One of the things that attracted me to printmaking is that you can make an edition of a certain piece of work,” Schermerhorn says. “For example, that ‘Nails’ print that’s up at Mesa, I have that same print up in New York right now. So the great thing is, I can have that same piece showing in two places.
“The process of printmaking is easier just to print another one, versus doing a whole other painting,” she says. “So when you do an edition, you can have a lot more circulating. That’s kind of the tradition of printmaking.”