Prints from artists around and outside the country will be displayed on the walls of the Holt-Russell Gallery thanks to one inventive printmaker.
Bill Ritchie of Seattle will travel to Baldwin City next week to work with public school and Baker students in the art of printmaking and highlighting the printing press that he designed called the Halfwood Press.
“It’s a beautiful little piece of sculpture because it’s made out of a variety of wood and steel, and it’s a printing press,” Lee Mann, chair of the art department, said.
As to how Ritchie came up with the idea of this unusual press, however, he said it’s a long story.
“It started when I wanted to build my own press, and I didn’t want to build that kind that I had had in the past, which were made by machine shops and ugly; so I decided to make one that was beautiful,” Ritchie said. “I took all the ideas I had ever had about beautiful presses or art, and I put them all together. I also love woodworking, and I had seen wooden presses in Europe; so I decided to bring back the idea of combining wood craft and steel to make an etching press.”
The Halfwood Press, and what it and its owners have created, will be the focus of the Holt-Russell Gallery exhibit titled, “Small is Beautiful.”
Walt Bailey, special assistant to the president for development of the arts, who suggested having Ritchie come to Baker, sent out invitations to those who have purchased a Halfwood Press asking them to send in their prints made by the press for exhibit.
“We are still receiving word back from people who are trying to get work in,” Bailey said. “I have an e-mail upstairs that is in Spanish from a woman who lives in Chile, and I am certain what she is saying is that her work is on the way.”
Bailey thought of Ritchie for an exhibit after receiving a book by him for Christmas. His in-laws thought he and Ritchie were similar in their backgrounds and that he would enjoy it.
“In an effort to keep the cost of the book down he put places in the book for illustrations, but he didn’t put any illustrations in them,” Bailey said. “He put the tagline underneath, but to get the illustration what you did was go online and download them and print them off and then if you want to you can cut and paste and put the illustrations in there. I thought anybody who is that inventive has to have something going for them.”
Ritchie will be doing a number of things while visiting Baldwin City, both on Baker’s campus and off.
He will go to the Baldwin public schools Tuesday to talk about his work and demonstrate how to use the press and will do the same in an art class at Baker Wednesday. At 7 p.m.
Thursday, in Owen’s Audio-Visual Room, Ritchie will give a lecture called “The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”
Ritchie isn’t sure what else he will be doing while visiting Kansas for the first time, although he and Bailey have discussed the possibilities.
“I’m pretty much placing my hands in the people of Baldwin City,” Ritchie said. “Because they know what’s what.”
