The Center for Contemporary Printmaking revealed the 2017 Editions Club Print, Land of Plenty, by artist Chuck Webster. The artist visited CCP in fall 2017 to develop the project under the guidance of Christopher Shore, first drawing on a lithographic stone to develop the black outlined areas on the print. Once Webster approved the lithograph impression, a variety of color combinations were developed until the final selection of 10 colors was reached to completely fill in the composition, requiring three carborundum aquatint plates. The resulting image places the viewer within one of the artist’s unique fantastical landscapes built through careful placement of color, texture, and line. The ambiguity of whether the space represents an interior or exterior and whether darkening represents an object or a shadow, is all part of the artist’s intent.
This print sits squarely within the artist’s oeuvre, particularly his ink drawings, which, similar to this year’s print, are populated solely by heavy, rough-hewn forms and structures buoyed up from their foundational moorings through Webster’s vibrant color choices. Also represented from both his paintings and drawings are a triad of his most recent favorite form-as-actor, the croquet mallet, seen here occupying a prominent place overlooking the landscape. His work actively engages the viewer in an ongoing search for resolution as one attempts to reconcile the ongoing tension present among all aspects of his compositions: the colors, the ambiguous roles of the mallets, the concave/convex push and pull of the space; he very purposefully uses texture to give materiality to a surface, thereby adding more layers to the mystery, not illuminating it.
About the Artist
Chuck Webster’s work is held in numerous public collections, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art,
Baltimore, MD; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and The Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT. He has received numerous prestigious awards and grants, including the Milton and Sally Michel Avery Visual Arts Fellowship at Yaddo; the MacDowell Fellowship, Peterborough, NH; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA. Additionally, his work has been exhibited all over the world, including solo exhibitions at Betty Cunningham Gallery, New York, NY; Zevitas Marcus, Los Angeles, CA; David Krut Projects, New York, NY; and ZieherSmith, New York, NY and included in group shows at MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; DC Moore Gallery, New York, and Dieu Donné, New York, NY.
The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, is located Mathews Park, 299 West Avenue, Norwalk, CT 06850
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