Gallery moves

Washington Printmakers will move to their new home at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center tomorrow. Their inaugural opening reception for their 25th Anniversary Reunion Show will be Friday, February 5, 5:30-8:00 pm.

25 years in gallery years is like 100 in any other business. One of the reasons that some of our oldest galleries in the DMV are collectives is because all the artist members share the load of the costs of running the space, which allows it to survive rocky austere times such as we are experiencing now.

And WP is by far the best DMV area gallery in its specialty of printmaking.

One word that has been hijacked from the art lexicon by the art merchants is the word "print."

A print is a woodcut, or a linocut, or an intaglio etching, etc. It is created by the printmaker, from beginning to printmaking. Anything else is a reproduction.

So if the original is a watercolor, or an oil, etc. and then you get digital copies of it, or four color separations, etc. all of those are reproductions of the original. However, it's hard to sell something when you describe it as a reproduction, and thus why dealers and artists alike describe their reproductions are "prints."

Giclees is a modern artsy way to describe a reproduction. Giclee is the French word for "spray" or "spurt." It describes the Iris burst printers originally used to make the beautiful new digital reproductions that started appearing in the art world around 15 years ago.

Nothing pisses off a printmaker faster than hearing a reproduction called a print. Want to see some good prints? Visit Washington Printmakers and Pyramid Atlantic often.