Noted artist and printmaker Linda Schwarz visited the Highpoint professional printshop for two weeks in February 2002 to work with Master Printer Cole Rogers on a print project. Schwarz’s prints are visually, conceptually, and technically complex. Appropriation and the alteration of existing imagery lies at the heart of much of her graphic work. She commonly uses text fragments, musicalscores, or other historically based documents as a starting point forher work. She then applies an intricate process of repeated alteration and overprinting of images (often printing on both sides of the paper) to fashion richly textured and highly detailed visual amalgams in which form and content become closely linked. Along the way, historical references are made her own, culminating in unique and compelling personal expressions. Schwarz uses various print processes in her work, ranging from such traditional techniques as woodcut, etching, and chine collé to modern innovations that include Xerox transfers, viscosity printing, and acrylic glazes. Her editioned work is commonly printed on handmade paper and sometimes features handpainted additions in tempera, ink, or varnish. Recent projects have focused on Germany’s rich literary and musical history, drawing on sources that include the handwritten scores of classical composer Johann Sebastian Bach and the manuscripts of the great German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin. More recently, Schwarz has integrated images from contemporary popular culture into her work, including a witty series of prints based on such iconic American candy products as fruit-flavored Life Savers and Hershey’s chocolate Kisses. Although much of her work is of moderate scale, Schwarz has produced a number of larger prints, some measuring over six feet in height. Her print editions are usually small in number and vary considerably from one impression to another, attesting to her love of experimentation and the role of “happy accidents” in the printmaking process.
