Printmaking

professor: Ondrej Michálek

The discipline of Graphic Arts is an interesting intersection of artistic and technical perspectives. Both of these perspectives have driven graphic arts in the past and still define it today. I believe that in the conception of graphic arts as a discipline “transformation of the image” plays the main role during its translation to the various techniques of printing. Transformation is not only visual and formal, but also semantic. In other words: what happens to an image, when it receives a pre-print form from a matrix, and vice versa: how the image is able to influence or even transform the technique of reproduction. In the final phase however both perspectives intermingle: the artistic imagination and the conceptual-technical imagination.
With one foot in art and one in technology, graphic arts makes an interesting pedagogical discipline. While contemporary artistic production is characterised by relativism, freedom and individual approach, technological imperatives (work with matrices, colour, print...) can be a counterbalance to open-endedness, an objective obstacle for which mastery is a necessity. It is about not seeing graphic techniques only as fixed mechanical approaches to be used once and forever, but as an alternative inspirational source, offering experimentation and the possibility to use chance in searching for original rendition.