About:
For more than thirty years, Bruce Muirhead has been sharing his love of printmaking with students at Hamilton College. He first learned to make prints while studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Boston University. Later, while teaching at Middlebury College, he was inspired by a colleague to return to printmaking and he included his prints in his portfolio when he interviewed for a faculty position at Kirkland College, Hamilton's coordinate college in 1972. The prints caught the attention of the Department Chair and Muirhead was hired to teach both painting and printmaking and he began a serious commitment to printmaking.
At Hamilton Muirhead's style matured and one can see references to the local landscape in much of his work. In an extension of his drafting technique, Muirhead works his plates much like he would a drawing. He inscribes images into the plates and then changes them, erasing them by burnishing and scraping, sometimes leaving references to a previous design and building up the images into multilayered compositions. What results is a play on the poast and the present, on vision and memory.
Many of Muirhead's landscapes contain old houses and factories that have inspired and intrigued him during his travels through Upstate New York and New England. Created from memory rather than photographs, the works are at once familiar yet mysterious; fleeting glances that are gone as quickly as they came. This tension between vision and memory, past and present is also found in his figurative pieces. Time and again, a familiar woman appears in his prints and yet she is changed, sometimes scraped away and reworked on an old plate into a new state. For Muirhead, these prints are about different states of being and they challenge us to explore notions of existence and identity.
Professor Printmaker features 50 of Bruce Muirhead's prints from the collection of the Amity Art Foundation which holds the largest collection of his prints. Founded by John A. Stewart '64, P'06, the Foundation seeks to promote, encourage, and support the inclusive, accessible, and social nature of traditional printmaking.
