Dan Welden: Solo 100
Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts, Brattleboro, VT • mitchellgiddingsfinearts.com • Through January 14, 2024
Printmaker and painter Dan Welden, 82, is marking a more-than-half-century career with his 100th solo exhibition. Yet the southern Vermont show is not a retrospective.
“I’m too young for a retrospective,” a fit, white-bearded Welden declared during a FaceTime call from his home, studio and gallery in Sag Harbor on Long Island, N.Y. With evident delight, he trained his iPhone camera on a door handle inside the post-and-beam studio he had built by hand: It was carved from his own bone, saved from a hip replacement.
Dan Welden: Solo 100 is a selection of two dozen recent works, most of which were completed between 2015 and 2022. They include zinc etchings, Welden’s signature solarplate etchings and mixed-media paintings. Another 30 works are collaborations he has produced with famous artists and others over the years, including many of his neighbors in the nearby Hamptons such as Elaine and Willem de Kooning, David Salle and Eric Fischl.
Welden has been teaching solarplate printmaking at museums and print shops around the country and abroad since 1971. It was then, as an art student in Munich, that he first discovered that water and sunlight were all that were needed to make prints from steel-backed polymer plates. (He’ll give a demonstration at Mitchell • Giddings on November 30.) While the method hasn’t come to dominate printmakers’ practice, it remains a healthy and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional techniques, which rely on toxic substances such as acids and solvents.
“Panda Haircut” — Welden’s titles sometimes veer into realism to describe his completely abstract works — is a 46-by-39-inch solarplate etching augmented with a screen print. Welden said he imports his solarplates from Japan, including the one used for this nearly-four-feet-tall work. The solarplate allowed him to incorporate some colors, he said; others were added through the screenprinting process.
The 2016 work’s yellow background is dominated by a striated vertical linear mass on the left and a rounded form on the right, separated by a ribbon-like vertical line in orange and bisected by two lower horizontal lines in dark yellow. The shapes and lines all have an organic feel, and they’re covered with tiny black lines and scribbles that do, indeed, look like hair.
Welden said his interest in line, a “key to the work,” originated from trips he took decades ago to see Canyon de Chelly’s lined rock faces in Arizona, and to New Zealand, where winding sheep tracks caught his eye. “Graphite Sheep” (2022), a zinc etching with mixed media, contains more lines the closer one looks: wispy black lines across a blue sky-like background, etched lines that reveal hidden color, even clouds of lines. Welden once fashioned a handmade auger to use as a drypoint tool, but he often simply adds color pencil lines to his work.
Color, in fact, is at least as important as line. In 2019, Welden was invited to the Prosper King House in Hampton Bays, then under historical renovation, to rescue materials left behind by a former artists’ colony. Among his haul were about twenty-two oxidized, corroded zinc plates that years of exposure had cemented together in pairs. The artist pried them apart and, using drypoint lines, copper sulfate etch, ink, paper and a press, created his “Aesop’s Fables” prints in black and white.
The images however, “just beckoned for color,” Welden recalled during the phone call. His next project, for which he won a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in 2022, was to redo the prints and augment them with acrylic, watercolor and crayon. Mitchell • Giddings’ show includes several works from the “Aesop’s Fables (Color Sequel)” series.
Welden began collaborating with invited artists at Hampton Editions, his printing business, after his return from Munich. “I’d say to my friends, ‘I’ve got this stone press,” he recalled. Hampton Editions is located on his property in the “cave” of a building that houses his gallery and a mediation floor above.
He and Willem de Kooning collaborated on stone lithographs “a bit before [the latter’s] death,” in 1997. Welden would take de Kooning’s work on a piece of acetate or mylar, put it in contact with the plate and expose it. “With Elaine,” he added, “we did the largest stone lithograph I’ve ever printed, from her series on the Lascaux caves.” Artists gifted him work, too; Willem’s charcoal drawing on paper is for purchase in Solo 100.
Why would a New York artist choose Vermont for his 100th exhibition? Welden said, simply, “I like that gallery. I just happened to stop in one day. I’d heard it was one of the best galleries in New England.” (His 101st exhibition opened at a gallery closer to home, Gold Coast Arts Center in Great Neck, N.Y., the day after the 100th opened.)
For her part, Mitchell • Giddings co-owner Petria Mitchell is thrilled. “This is the blockbuster show that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” she said. “Dan is such a star in the printmaking world.”
— Amy Lilly