The Print Perspective

          It only seems fitting for the first article on this site to be about an artist who is also just getting started, and with any luck The Print Perspective will achieve as much success as Julia Hendrickson is poised to achieve herself.  Since earning her B.A. from the College of Wooster in studio art with an English minor only two years ago, she transplanted herself to Chicago and has already made some serious power-moves in starting her career as an artist.

          I had the chance to visit with Hendrickson last August, and I was very interested to meet her based on what I had heard: that she was going to be setting up an intaglio printing press in her house.  For those that don’t know, the need for specialized equipment makes printmaking perhaps the most difficult method for independent artists to do.  Not only do the press and other equipment cost a fortune, but it also requires a decent amount of space.  If buying a starter set of oil paints and some canvas is like renting an apartment, then operating your own printing press is like building your own house.

          Possibly the most important move she made in her artistic career was quitting her restaurant job in January this year.  This gave her the time to become a teaching assistant at Marwen, an arts foundation in downtown Chicago, and through a connection she made as a member of the Chicago Printer’s Guild, begin working as an assistant for Jenny Beorkrem, the creator of Ork Posters.  You might not know the name Ork, but there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the typographical maps of cities around.  There is a section on Ork’s website called “I Spy Ork!” that shows her posters appearing in movies, magazines, and in the hands of several celebrities, a testament to the success that the operation has achieved .  Ork Posters began on a very small scale, selling prints through the arts and crafts website etsy.com, and with all that Hendrickson has accomplished in her short time in Chicago it is perfectly possible for her to achieve equal success in her efforts. 

An Ork Poster found in the racks at Screwball Press, where Hendrickson often works

          I was a little nervous as I went around back of the ivied building near Logan Square that she recently moved to.  Being from Kansas, I’ve always found Chicago to be a very private place full of locked doors and closed gates, so I crept up the back staircase towards her apartment feeling a bit like an intruder.  But I found her at the top of the stairs and she quickly welcomed me in.  “I like that it’s a nice, friendly Midwestern place, even if that sounds kind of cheesy,” she said of the city.  “If your car breaks down or if your bike gets a flat tire people will stop and help you,” she said.  It wasn’t exactly the typical comment I would expect to hear about Chicago.  Perhaps it was simply that Hendrickson’s friendly nature was able to cut through the harsh exterior of the city that made her perception different from mine.

Left to right: "Print Collage #1", "Barnyard (dreams)", and "Print Collage #2", by Julia Hendrickson

          A lot of her recent prints use photo etching, a process I’ve not encountered much before.  It involves printing a positive image on a transparency, then placing it on top of a photo-sensetive plate and exposing it to UV light.  The light hardens the areas exposed to the light, and the soft, unexposed areas are washed away leaving an impression of the image in the plate.  This can then be printed just like a regular intaglio plate, but without any of the toxic chemicals the process normally requires. 

          This process does not produce what one might consider a perfect photo image, but it creates an antique and sentimental effect that suits the ideas behind her work very nicely.  In her statement she describes the digital age as making images fleeting and meaningless, and her prints are a reaction against that tendency.  “I like the process of going from the digital photograph and then making it physical again; creating a tangible object from something that’s digital,” she said as we looked at some of her etchings.  And indeed, she has achieved marvelous results in this endeavor.  Many of her prints also include collaged images that mimic the antique feel of the printed image, and the obvious effort and craft that goes into creating these works really makes them feel like a precious object rather than just an image.      

This intaglio print with mixed media measures in at a modest 3.5" by 5"

          Most of her prints are modestly sized which fits her ideas on more than one level.  The use of small sizes enhances the sense that she is creating valuable personal items, and also goes along with her recent focus of examining people’s personal collections by making the prints feel like small collectible artifacts themselves.  “I like to monumentalize the tiny things we have in our lives that no one usually sees, but they’re still important to us or say something about us,” she said. 

          I gathered a strong sense of surrealism from her work, but not in the typical means used by Dali and Magritte.  She creates such a tight focus on these small objects the viewer’s perspective shrinks down to that scale and causes them to ponder the importance of the objects.  This is very effective because among any collection there is always some linking aspect between all the items, and even if the intended meaning of the collection isn’t apparent the viewer can easily create one, which again fits well with the sentimental quality of her work.  Just about everything she makes is very cohesive in this way, yet also very simply done as if it took almost no effort to get all the pieces to fall into place.

          These same ideas are even present in some of her older work, but to hear Hendrickson describe it herself, the decision to use Wonder Woman comics in her senior thesis work was unrelated to her current ideas.  I think there is at least a subconscious decision in her early use of this imagery because comic books attract some of the most rabid collectors society has ever seen, and aesthetically the collage images she uses in her newer work also look similar to comics. 

          These early works have hints of the surrealism found in her current work, along with abstraction and a heavy pop art vibe from her use of Wonder Woman comics.  “I work with them because she was the first female super-heroine that was created, but rather than being a bastion of feminism she was created because the guy who dreamed her up basically wanted to see women tied up and bound, and ultimately be submissive,” she said.  Hendrickson reclaims these images by obliterating them, painting massive swaths of color over large portions of the original artwork. 

          To the untrained eye it may look like she’s randomly filling in the original composition, but I recognized that she was very intentionally symbolically annihilating this imagery.  In particular this quality showed through in her decision to leave only select parts of Wonder Woman revealed.  In one panel only Wonder Woman’s eyes and mouth are allowed to protrude from a pink blob of paint.  In another panel only her legs from the knee down remain.  In yet another piece Wonder Woman has been reduced to small chunks by way of X-acto knife and re-arranged in a swirling cluster of parts.  Hendrickson literally mutilates these comics, destroying their symbolic sleight at feminine power, and in the process produces a very artistically interesting product. 

          It’s not too far of a stretch to say that Hendrickson is picking up the slack for Wonder Woman, who by no fault of her own failed to be a true figure of female power.  It is truly rare to meet such a young artist that has accomplished so much and still has plenty of potential to spare.  She even understands the importance of balancing artistic ambitions with realistic needs.  “I’ve also been focusing a lot on other things lately, like cooking and reading and writing,” she told me on her back porch overlooking the picturesque garden below and a patchwork of rooftops fading into the distance.   She seems to know that the best results are achieved by combining several interests into a healthy balance of thought and action.  My advice would be to start paying attention to her now, because at the rate she’s going you might not be able to afford her work ten years from now.

Be sure to visit Julia Hendrickson’s website here to see her entire portfolio.