Next on Gallery America.

It's all about printmaking, beginning with a quirky OSU art professor who's retiring after three decades of teaching.

Thing I like about printmaking is there's a kind of a magic to it in some ways.

There's a mystery to it in some way because you don't know exactly what you're going to end up with in the end.

A Key West artist uses an unexpected source for her prints.

Every time you pull that paper off, it's like a big surprise.

A Louisiana printmaker shares how art helped him overcome learning disabilities growing up.

It's giving me fuel and things to draw from that have shown up in the.

Work for years, and a man in Reno put serious heat into his wood prints.

I take a torch and actually burn around the piece.

Hello, Oklahoma.

Welcome to Gallery America, a show that brings you great art from Oklahoma and around the nation.

Today we're in Stillwater.

We're here to talk about printmaking.

And we're going to meet an art professor who's been teaching here for 32 years and is about to retire.

But first, we're going to one of his classes and learning about his detailed, wonderful art from the man himself.

Meet the incomparable Mark Sisson He's like this weird genius.

He knows everything under the Sun.

I know that he loves printmaking.

A rich trove Of interests.

bicycling unicycling telescopes.

he's an amateur astronomer.

Stamp collecting.

one of my favorite people to listen to.

Diarrhea of the mouth.

he can talk on any subject.

Like once he gets going, you can't stop talking.

Well, Mark Sisson as an artist.

I think that's clear.

Who am I, right?

Hello, my name is Mark Sisson.

I teach printmaking I've had people say, Oh, well, he's an iconoclast like, I'm, you know, attacking the very structures of our society.

But I've had other people call me a moralist.

So that seemed like a pretty broad spectrum I'm covering there, and I'm alright with them thinking either one of those things if they want.

Thing I like about printmaking is there's a kind of a magic to it in some ways.

There's a mystery to it in some way.

I try to get a little more light on when possible.

And then I take my glasses off for this part.

It's fraught with possibility, and it's also fraught with peril because you don't know exactly what you're going to end up with in the end.

I'm interested in, you know, human beings as social animals, as political animals.

And I thought, Well, I'm going to do portraits, but I'm going to do portraits where the way they're gesturing and what they wear is really going to speak to current events, things that are going on right now.

This piece here was about trickle down economics and sweatshop labor.

This work here really is dealing with sexual assault on campus portrait of Cameron Richardson peace piece.

Cameron, as a former student that speaks about Black Lives Matter, but I think more in general speaks about the value of access to the ballot box.

I think for me that your models, for your stories were chosen from people that you know in your immediate community, some students here, some fellow faculty, and you kind of put them in a different life.

If they had said no, I didn't really have a backup plan at that point.

I did this self-portrait with my cat, vango.

vango was my favorite cat and I knew he was dying and I had dug a hole in the back yard to to bury him.

It took a long time to do this work because it was really painful.

I put it away.

It's still hard for me to look at.

Mark Sisson is our printmaker.

And as such, he teaches all the classes and printmaking.

He's extremely knowledgeable and a lot of our students haven't really ever met anybody like him.

So our students are completely fascinated by him.

Print making requires what we affectionately call a matrix.

It's indirect.

painting is direct.

You know, you grab some paint put on and put it on canvas.

And that's why you need students who.

are ocd.

you need people who really are compulsive.

I saw that there was a printmaking class, and I was like, Oh, I really want to take that class.

I'm doing ten colors and you work lights to darks.

I mean, you have to be.

Patient with this stuff.

You can't rush into anything.

The best students always make this worthwhile.

It's not just a one way street where I pour a bunch of, you know, information down their throats and then they go and they produce these brilliant things that it's there's a lot more give and take.

I think that people understand.

It is hard to imagine leaving, it is hard to imagine, like moving on to a different chapter, and I will miss being around here and being around my colleagues and the support staff and the students.

Mark has been my sounding board and, you know, ally, if you will.

We all have people that help us get through situations, and I will miss him greatly, for sure.

And the thing that I'm also going to miss for our students, it's.

He's just really.

A fantastic artist and teacher.

He gets in there and helps.

Students see how to draw.

And when you look at the work that they're able to accomplish during a semester in his class, it's phenomenal.

When I first came to OSU was in August of 1989.

Prior to that, I'd never lived south of the Mason-Dixon line.

But now I've lived here longer than I've lived anyplace.

And so this, in a way, is my home now it feels like that.

Just because I'm retired now, I mean, it's not like a lot.

Of jobs where it's like, Oh, what am I going to do?

Go play golf?

to me that would be like the worst nightmare in the world.

The art part of it stays.

Out there for this one.

You mean this is just who I am at this point.

And so for whatever that's worth.

To see more of Mark's artworks, visit his website.

Markdsisson.myPortfolio.com and follow him on Instagram @MarkdSisson.

Next, we go to Key West Florida to meet an artist who also makes prints but using something quite unexpected not dogs, but something in the same ballpark.

She uses fish meat.

Lisa Lee Herman.

You can live anywhere on the planet and do this style of art.

He's gorgeous.

Yep.

If you didn't, then with this, yeah, looking down.

My name is Lisa Herman.

I'm a marine artist here in the upper keys.

And I'm the owner and operator of Gallery of the Arts.

The keys is definitely an influence on my art.

Hands down.

I mean, you can't ask for a better color palette.

Then what we have here.

I really like where the horizon line, I'm just in love with it.

I mean, you get to see it so often here and not being in the keys when whenever I whenever I leave the keys, I don't realize how rare it is to see that horizon line, you know, and it's just so comforting to see that.

So whenever I feel like painting, I feel like that's got to be there for me, it stabilizes it.

And when you look at the horizon on the ocean, it never looks the same.

There's something simple and, you know, primitive about it.

It's it's cool.

And I think that's what brought me into the Gyotaku process.

It's very straightforward.

It's very clean.

Gyotaku is very interesting.

Originally, it started back in the 1800s in Japan, and it was a way fishermen could record their catches basically before cameras existed.

And because of this interesting layout and how they recorded it, it started to turn into its own form of art.

This is neat.

He's cute.

Each fish has their own little characteristics and personalities like this guy, a little character.

He's missing a little part here and a little part there.

So each time I do it, I get a little bit more familiar with the fish and I make sure I pull up all those little different dorsal fins in there to make sure their tails like as fanned out as it can.

I try to capture the fish like as lit up and excited as it is in the wild.

This one's perfect sized.

I like to get a picture of the exact fish that I've printed.

So when I come back to the gallery, I can make sure all of its little spots, all of its eyes are exactly the way this one looked.

Some of the mutton snappers have really, really cool teal like blue around their eyes, and I always want to make sure I want to get it just right.

It's like their little signature.

Each fish that I do you talk to friends of 100% will be something that everybody can share and eat.

I'm not ever going to take a fish that has just the purpose for printing.

It has to be utilized beyond that.

So when I am doing that, I'm thinking about this fish.

We are going to eat it afterwards.

So I only use very nontoxic, water based acrylic paints.

I do it traditionally where I use a very, very black acrylic paint and I always do the fish in black.

And when I pull it off after that, I do the embellishments.

Some clients want just the eye embellish.

Some clients want the whole fish and embellished in color.

Some want it just black and white, as is.

So there's a lot of different stages and and ways you can and you can do this fish every time you pull that paper off.

It's like a big surprise.

Yep.

Perfect, as I was exploring doing the Gyotaku on fish.

I thought, you know, it'd be really cool to do it on other nature.

one of my friends has a big, beautiful butterfly garden, so I asked her if she ever finds any of the butterflies that passed on didn't make it.

Let me see if I can somehow make them live on forever and got my hands on a couple of butterflies and they turned out magnificent.

I do use different inks instead of the paint.

The paint was a little bit thick on the butterfly, so I use just sumi inks.

And now it's I mean, I've tried dragonflies, bumblebees, different leaves, different seashells.

I'm always experimenting with different style canvases like I love my stretched white canvas, but there's something exciting and challenging about painting on oyster shells.

I've painted on sand dollars.

The swordfish are now doing.

The Gyotaku was very, very interesting where it's not your basic plan, you know how to go about it.

Some different shells, some different bills.

They kind of tell you what they want and they you kind of explore what that shape is and what that can house for that specific piece of nature.

To see more of Lisa's artwork, visit her website GyotakubyLisalee.com.

Next, we meet a printmaking professor in Louisiana who found art helped him while growing up with dyslexia.

Meet Brian Kelly.

I'm a print maker, and I work in the four disciplines, woodcut lithography, but also etching and silkscreen lithography is probably my main process and lithography.

There's a printing process that utilizes limestone or a aluminum template or photo plates.

And the artist generates an image on one of those matrices.

And then once the image is completed, it is processed using gum Arabic, nitric acid and sometimes phosphoric acid, and then ink is applied to that surface, and then that ink is then transferred to paper.

So it's a pointagraphic printing process that really embraces drawing draftsmanship, which is a core of what my work is about.

And woodcut is a process in which you utilize a piece of wood or a piece of linoleum.

A drawing is executed on that matrix and then you use gouges to remove material.

Material that's removed does not accept ink material that's left does.

Accepting silkscreen is a printing process that utilizes a mesh that is stretched onto a wooden frame and you draw on that mesh.

You can draw with screen filler or drawing fluid, or you can coat the screen with a photosensitive emulsion and you can shoot to that screen photographic image.

Then, once the images are processed, whether it's photo for a motion or whether it's screen filler drawing fluid, there are areas that are stenciled or blocked out areas that are open .

Ink is then spread across the screen.

The areas that are open ink will pass through onto the printing paper.

All the printing processes have the ability to make multiples enjoy the idea of making multiples of an image.

I've always been interested in pattern line texture.

Those are things that are part of my drawing vocabulary, and I've always been interested in Balance Cemetery in a cemetery.

And even I play a cemetery within a composition that forces cemetery within it.

So I've always had that and always thought that way.

The current body of work certainly is more of a visual representation of that.

All my prints start out in my head as a visual black and white kind of image.

I can see them that way as I'm drawing.

So color really is kind of a secondary element to the image, it supports the main image.

When I do shift into using color, it really is more of a organic thing.

It creeps in and sometimes it creeps in with just one color.

Other times it creeps in.

It's too, and it just sort of grows from there.

I didn't use a lot of color and I came down to Louisiana.

When I was up in Illinois, it was really black and white colors, very different here, and it's acidic.

It's bright.

It's saturated.

My work is autobiographical.

It's always been that way.

My work is about my experiences going all the way back to when I was a child of my earliest memories all the way through current day.

It's a reflection and documentation of all my experiences in the landscape.

Experiences between myself and other people, and sometimes the characters and the elements within the work take the form of animals.

Sometimes they take the forms of people.

But I'm also thinking about universality, meaning experiences that we all have and we all can connect to.

And I think that's really important.

Will the viewer ever know my language completely or how am personifying something?

Probably not.

And that's OK. My personal experiences, although unique for me, they're similar to a lot of people.

We all have early memories.

We all have death in the family.

We all go through struggles.

We all have that.

Our favorite dog who passes away.

I have dyslexia and I have learning disabilities and comprehension and retention.

When I was diagnosed, I was in first grade.

Back then, if you were labeled learning disabled, you went to a special classroom for maybe the whole day or maybe a few hours into you went back to your classroom for the subjects that you were handling.

So for me, I was removed from the class in the morning and I was gone a big part of the day.

It would happen at about 9:30 and I would get up and I would walk out the classroom door into a hallway.

And as I walked in the hallway, other kids would leave their classrooms and they would show up in the hallway and we would all walk to the special ed room and this went through high school.

one of the things that's always in the work is connected to that is borders frames the frame of the hallway walking down that all of those years has stuck in the work.

The disabilities was challenging, for sure.

At the same time, it was a blessing because it taught me a lot about perseverance.

It also taught me a lot about how to be an artist.

It's giving me fuel in things to draw from that that have shown up in the work for years.

Illinois is very different when it comes to art education.

Even when I was a student back in the early seventies, I think they were pretty progressive.

So through art was a mandated subject K through twelve.

I remember drawing in kindergart And finally, we meet a wood printer in Reno who conjures the great outdoors with a serious jolt of electricity.

Literally.

Meet Ben Rogers.

I would describe my work as taking a piece of wood with the natural wood grain, the natural feel, the smell of the wood and burning it with fire, then taking imagery and applying it right over the top of the wood like painting on to a wooden canvas.

My name is Ben Rogers, and I create burned wood prints.

I'll choose maple plywood because it's very strong and it's very flat and take that piece, cut it down in my workshop and then I'll crowder the edges.

And then I'll claim the edges, so I take a torch and actually burn around the piece.

And then I'll take a bit of water and baking soda solution and spread that over the top to help the electricity conduct.

And it also helps it stay on the surface of the wood rather than going through the middle.

The next stage is to burn it with electricity.

The process of electrocuting the wood is pretty amazing, so I have a machine that I created in my workshop and I'll take that and run an electric current through the wood, which travels along the surface of the wood burning natural shapes into it.

People call it fractals or tree limbs or lightning, all reminiscent of what these burn marks in the wood look like.

And two are alike on this fractal shapes, they're totally unique, just like nature, just like a tree branch or lightning, and it can never be reproduced.

Sand everything down, so it's nice and smooth and looks really crisp and then run it through a big flatbed printer, and that puts ink directly onto the wood, creating the imagery that is the final piece.

During the printing process, I'll take an image into Photoshop and I'll take a photograph of the wood and overlay it in Photoshop so that I can see that tan canvas because basically I'm starting with wood instead of white making wood on paper.

In recent years, what's also helped is a printer that has the capability to lay down white ink.

And so as the prints move through, a layer of white goes down first before the color is applied over the top.

And this allows the colors to really explode on the wood canvas.

Growing up in Lake Tahoe, I've got a ton of Tahoe imagery, and I use a combination of my own imagery, but a lot of stock imagery, a lot of trees, bears, Tahoe mountains and chairlifts, ski resorts, stuff like that.

I love creating custom ones.

People love to have their own unique picture.

You know that family photo and having a unique canvas that I can create.

one thing that stands out that surprises people is when they pick up a piece of my art.

Oftentimes they'll smell it and it smells like burned wood.

It smells like if they've ever been in Tahoe in the winter time and they've had a fire in the fireplace, it smells like home or it smells, you know, like a campfire from their childhood or something.

And so that's kind of a unique side effect.

My favorite part of the whole process and giving pieces to people and watching their eyes light up when you show them, hold it up and they go, Wow, the uniqueness of the art drives me, and I get positive reactions wherever I go.

And it really fuels combined desire to keep going and all the positivity that surrounds it.

To see more of Ben's artwork, visit him on Instagram @ burnedwoodprints.

That's all the time we have from Stillwater.

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