Printmaking Courses in Spain

Granada, Spain, August 25, 2001–With her soon-to-be-released collection of Printmaking Master Class download videos, Granada-based Anglo-Spanish artist, Maureen Booth, is taking the next step in her 30-year career as a fine-art printmaker, editor and educator. “For the past couple of years, ever since we built my Gallinero creative residence, I’ve been teaching more printmaking workshops than ever,” says Maureen. “Artists arrive from around the world to do workshops and one-on-one collaborative printmaking projects with me. Unfortunately, there’s not enough time for me to attend everyone. Also, as my studio is located in rural Spain, I’m a bit out of the way for many artists who want to perfect their printmaking techniques. So these videos are a way of reaching those people.”

The first step in the Printmaking Master Classes project was to shoot the first five videos and a trailer in Maureen’s Pomegranate Editions studio, located in a village in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains outside of Granada. The trailer will be posted on YouTube and other online video platforms with free access in mid-September, 2001. The full-length videos will be offered for sale as downloads. “If these first five videos are successful,” says Maureen, “we can make more. Every time we do a video recording session new ideas arise.”

The five videos are entitled:

• Make Prints Like the Old Masters–Traditional Printmaking, Part I
• It’s Easy to Make a (Bad) Solar-Plate Print–Solar-Plate Printmaking Secrets
• Nice Plate, How Are You Going to Print It?–Creative Printing
• The Fine-Art Printmakers Logo–How to Make a Chop
• Turning Epoxy Solder into Art– Liquid Metal Printmaking

The idea for the Printmaking Master Classes project came from filmmaker and video producer, Juan Carlos Romera. “We’ve been friends with Juan Carlos for many years,” says Maureen. “A few years ago I played the part of an English printmaker who falls in love with a Spanish fisherman in Bive, one of Juan Carlos’s short films. So, a few months ago he shows up with an ambitious new project to make printmaking instruction videos and offer them as downloads on Internet. One cup of coffee later we were partners.

Maureen Booth, from Manchester, U.K., has been making fine-art prints in her Granada studio since the early 1980’s. In those 30 years she has passed through all the stages of a young artist’s progress from beginner to master printmaker and editor. “I was lucky in the beginning,” she says, “to be selected to study in the etching workshop of the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation in Granada. I was actually doubly lucky as I worked under the guidance of the maestro José García Lomas. Pepe Lomas was the ideal mentor, a gentle soul and a true European master, formed in the some of the finest Italian and Catalan print studios.

After the Rodríguez-Acosta Foundation workshop closed in 1981 Maureen had the opportunity to purchase one of the etching presses with all the trimmings—custom-built tables, flattening press, drying racks, rollers, inks and papers—and set up her own printmaking workshop in her painting studio at home. Printmaking soon took over.

Maureen’s desire is that these new videos might be useful to both amateur and professional printmakers, and that they might make a small contribution towards extending printmaking culture among artists and art lovers around the world.