Michael Mazur claims "I'm definitely not a purist"

Michael Mazur was a guest this evening of the MFA's Print and Drawing Club. Michael took the group of about 25 of us through a variety of print-making processes that he uses. He showed proofs along the way to making several prints. For one of the prints in his Dante's Inferno series, he had one of the original mylars that was used to make the metal plate, the copper plate itself, which had been reworked several times (but before the steel electroplated layer was added). For that work he also share a working proof, the B.A.T. (Bon a Tirer -- meaning "good to pull"), and final edition print.

He also walked us through a series of 5 proofs starting with the first flat produced with a "rainbow roll" (a method where one or more colors are literally rolled on the paper to create a colored stripe), new images were superimposed in additional colors and then finally a wood block was used to print a wood-grained texture onto the final image.

In another interesting example of using different printing techniques, Michael showed us to very different prints of the same image. One was made as an etching and the other produced with an inkjet printer. "No one should be frightened by injet prints" he advocates. After the lecture, I shared my skepticism of injet prints with Michael. Think about the image - don't worry about the process he said.

In Boston, you can find Michaels work at Barbara Krakow Gallery.