More from SGC Philadelphia

Thursday, March 25th

U of the Arts
We started out at the University of the Arts.  We first saw the exhibition "Social Remarques" with ASU's John Rissieuw's piece made from the clothing of landmine victims.  There were also 5 print portfolios/exchanges on view which were very exciting to see.  We love to examine them, trying to figure "how did they do that!"  From UArts we went to the Penn. Academy of Fine Arts for the rest of the day.


PAFA
We attended 3 demos:  Viscosity  Color Printing = C-; Spooning Large Format Woodcuts = B and The Drum Leaf (book binding) = A.  Joseph Lappie was an infectious presenter who had the large crowd quite attentive to his process.  We saw our first exhibition which was part of Philagrafika with some VERY interesting works like Orit Hofshi's woodcuts.  The wood used were ordinary planks and after being carved and printed were hung as part of the piece, along with the prints.   We also enjoyed 6 more print exchanges and a wonderful show of prints from the C.R. Ettiger Studio which included a print from our friend, Janet Towbin.  We ran into Dan Welden in the halls but didn't really see any other people we knew.  Too busy looking at the prints to check out other people's name tags.

Friday, March 26th
 

This morning we started with the Vendor's Fair, our second favorite part of the SGC Conference (open portfolio tomorrow is our favorite).  We managed to find a few treasures like a wheat paste shaker, a funny tube of rice paste and some drypoint tools from EC Lyons.  We attended then, the presentation by Judy Pfaff whose work was fascinating.  She is a favorite of Marlys' and I can see why.  She definitely works "outside the lines".  After the lecture we headed to the curb to catch a shuttle to Temple University's Tyler School of Art.  We passed an amiable 30 minute wait at the curb with John Rissieuw and Joe Segura.  On the bus ride, I again noticed how many murals abound in the Philadelphia area.  

Tyler School of Art

What a wonderful place Tyler is.  Great spaces, lots of room, great accoutrement.  Lucky students.  We found another great Philagrafika site here with a video showing Thomas Kilpper creating a huge linoleum cut on the floor of an old East German building with 90 images documenting the history of surveillance in East Germany from the Nazis to the present time.  He narrated the piece and said it took over 24 hours to carve one figure.  My arms ached just watching it.  Then we attended another demo, this time with Monika Meler, who showed us an alternative approach to relief printing.  She rolled out ink on mat board and placed a stencil cut in matboard under the inked board and then put a Japanese paper down on the inked mat board and ran it thru the press.  Et voila!  A soft edged transfer, which she repeats and repeats up to 30 times.  Phew!  We only got to see 2 layers.  Here is a photo of the two layers and a ghost.  Definitely an "A" demo!  Afterwards we cruised through the Rochelle Toner exhibition before shuttling back to our hotel.