Comment on this story What: It’s Women’s Work! Women at Littleton Studios When: Thru July 3 Where: Bennett Galleries, 5308 Kingston Pike

Littleton’s influence reveals importance of medium

by Heather Joyner Spica

When it comes to new technology, hindsight is indeed 20/20; once we know how something like LCD TV works, we can’t help but wonder why it took so long to develop. The same could be said about various printmaking techniques. People have been carving into stone for millennia, but lithography wasn’t introduced until 1796 (followed by chromolithography decades later). An even newer printmaking medium—dating back only 30 years—is vitreography, the brainchild of famed glass artist Harvey Littleton.

Bennett Galleries’ current exhibition titled “It’s Women’s Work! Women at Littleton Studios” understandably excludes Littleton himself, but it radiates the spirit he’s inspired in artists who’ve visited and used his studio in Spruce Pine, N.C.

Although prints were made from glass matrices in 1840s Vienna and exhibited at London’s Crystal Palace, vitreography as we know it did not really emerge as a viable medium until Littleton came along. Born more than 80 years ago into a “glass community” (his father Jesse was the first physicist to enter Corning New York’s glass industry, and his mother once baked a cake in a sawed-off glass battery jar), Littleton grew up with a sense of that substance’s possibilities. He remarked in a recent interview with Falconer

Byrd of the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, “Glass was table talk in our family. When my father was stuck with me on Saturday—I was the youngest of four children—he would take me to the [Corning Glassworks] factory... He’d turn me over to the stockman in the laboratory [who would] sit me in front of a Bunsen burner with some glass tubing...those were my early experiences.” And what began as an experiment when Littleton was teaching at the University of Wisconsin—before relocating to North Carolina—has become a phenomenon of sorts.

When asked what community other than Corning has been important to his development as an artist, Littleton acknowledged the university setting, adding, “...anywhere artists gather together and find a sympathetic milieu, whether...Paris at the turn of the century, or New York in the ‘40s, or the mountains of North Carolina in the ‘80s...these are all places where one artist works with another.” For local viewers, the focus of the Bennett

Galleries’ show—prints addressing issues of concern to women who have worked with Littleton—may be less interesting than the vitreographic medium itself.

Concerning the printmaking genre he’s championed, the Cranbrook educated Littleton says, “What we [originally] wanted to do was to investigate the material, like painters [have investigated] paint...not with the thought of making anything, you know, but as another material to investigate...just as the original experimental course in the Bauhaus took all kinds of materials [and] investigated them.”

But that investigation has yielded several hundred editions of prints resulting from two separate processes: one similar to intaglio—wherein line is produced by engraving tools and areas of tone result from acid washes and sand blasting—and one called siligraphy or “waterless lithography.” Unlike the first method, siligraphy uses water-soluble drawing materials and employs silicone masks that repel ink in areas where no image is desired. Both processes use 3/8-inch thick glass that’s finally positioned in an etching press, and viscosity of color is determined by the amount of pressure applied.

“Because glass has such a resistance to compression, it’s better than any other material,” Littleton says. “That’s why it’s good for printing. See, it’s the same kind of thinking that my father used in using glass for cooking [when working for Corning]. He found that it cooked more evenly because it was an insulator. And people thought it wouldn’t be a good cooking material because it was an insulator. But he turned the thinking around...[it’s] the same way with printing. People think glass breaks. On the other hand, it’s the strongest material under compression.” When asked in 2001 about vitreography’s importance to him, Littleton responded, “...[Vitreography is important because] I can’t do the hot glass. You know, when you’re approaching 79, there’s a limit. Hot glass is a young man’s job.”

As for the artists on view at Bennett, many are known for work unrelated to glass. With guidance from Littleton’s master printer and Bennett exhibitor Judith O’Rourke, all have produced interesting prints, and some have combined various other media with the vitreographic process.

For instance, digital transfer meets intaglio vitreography and siligraphy in the work of three women who call themselves the Digital Atelier: Dorothy Krause, Bonny Lhotka and Karen Schminke. One such piece, Krause’s Farm Journal, incorporates pages from a Civil War-era journal and a tintype into a composition that Littleton Studios says “unites the subtle color that is possible with digital technology with the depth and texture of vitreography” and that it calls “a heady blend of high technology and nostalgia for things past.” Other artists, like Gretel Eisch, the late Hollis Sigler, and Carol Wax, have perfected a less complex approach that evokes the spontaneity of watercolor painting.

Littleton has expressed a sense of awe regarding what more than 80 fellow artists have accomplished at his studio. “We haven’t started yet. We’re really coming. Every day something new happens,” he says. And in keeping with the girl traversing a field of blue in Eisch’s print titled Courage, the possibilities seem limitless.

June 24, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 26 © 2004 Metro Pulse