Stefano Beccari- Monumental print Masterprinter and Sculptor, Sarita Sundar - Graphic Artist and Director of Trapeze Studio in India and I decided to found GLOBAL FINE ART PRINTS® in order to promote and nurture the Fine Art Print and the Post-Classic print in an equal balance between East and West, Twelve western Print Artists and Twelve eastern Print Artists will be carefully selected and invited in each category over the next two years.

We expect to develop a dialogue and creative showcase as well as exchange focused on the Fine Art Print.
GLOFAP : GLOBAL FINE ART PRINTS® aim to create a debate aorund the ways fine art prints are situated in an artistic, historical, cultural and socio-economic context and the role as well as link to craftmanship in the graphic arts.

However, this is a debate in practice. The partcicpating artists will stage shows, sell their work online through the GLOFAB site, and meet in master class workshops sharing both thoughts and skills.

My emotive driving force behind the research is profoundly rooted in a personal struggle in believing to what degree making prints i.e. art, is of any use at a larger societal scale. While the making of the print itself and the constant drawing which precedes any of my images have undeniably sustained and focused my existence which emerges from a challenging past it has also created an internal conflict of both seeing that art can occasionally absolve trauma, while feeling , based on an inherited Swedish Lutheran work ethic that as art may also be a form of luxury and a narcissistic part of society’s cultural life, and that it holds no greater value than mere consumption. Ironically, it is this very counterpoint of my own dilemma, poised between a compulsion to make prints and simultaneously doubting art’s meaningful application which drives me to interrogate to what degree socially engaged art may either be a form of therapy and community evangelism or to be a practice which genuinely may contribute to both individual or communal transformation.
Since the print is so curiously placed between commerce, community and self expression, between the utilitarian and the political, the print is is, in the pockets of time, the art form of the underdog, and its themes appear to embrace universal concerns such as freedom, and suffering.

I recall, in particular, the dark work of Bosch and Brueghel as well as the dreamlike, lyrical and exotic woodblock prints of Hiroshige. The Ukiyo-e prints and the Bosch’s and Brueghel’s work demonstrate poetic lines drawn from daily life, of the fisherman hauling his nets and women buying fish and peasants toiling. The ordinary becomes extraordinary in its details in these prints, and stand in contrast to Tolstoy’s idea of art made since the renaissance to ‘titillate the bored rich’ transmitting only ‘ pride, sexual desire and the weariness of the world.’
Hanfling : Philosophical Aesthetics (1992:182)

The dilemma of my practice is to make more than images imitating life displayed in not so accessible galleries but to test , through the art work itself, what role does printmaking play within the context of the idea of an honourable practice? Why do I need to anchor my practice in a purpose beyond my own compulsion to make visual work where the creative exploration solely justifies the art? Eric Gill, the British graphic artist, asks himself what is the purpose of him doing any work adding - that wouldn’t it be better of he was a carpenter making chairs? He wonders: ‘Or suppose my mind is seething with ideas but that I have no adequate reason for making anything. The flattery of rich connoisseurs does not seem adequate. The placing of things in museums seems absurd. The mere exhibition of my own idiosyncrasy, even if the exhibition be well paid, seems a foolish proceeding (….) Would I not rather make something really useful to ordinary human beings? ‘
(1983:54)
Eric Gill stands as an example of a life devoted to art as an honourable practice and I have been lucky to have worked and met another , such as Bob Blackburn, yet, I am anguished by the use of artists’ images in a world challenged climatically, economically and morally, and wonder, as Adorno, that ‘The culture industry fills empty time with more emptiness.’? O’Connor( 2000: 260)

However the outcome of the investigation, I am certain that printmaking as an art practice enriched , and continues to do so, in knowledge and adventure , my life through discipline, craft and connection with ongoing collaborations to a worldwide community. The end result may be that in being exposed to new ideas in drawing and printmaking, my creative life undertakes a positive paradigm shift as it has in the past Initially, the print, for me, was a way out. Today, it is a way forward.

However, it remains to be seen to what degree the print proves to be an honourable practice and if it can effectively be a socially engaged art form.
If so, I may, in the end, be able to reconcile the visceral lyricism of Hiroshige’s Japanese line work, the darkness Bosch and Breugehl and the transcendendent humanism of Goya’s etched images of war atrocities with a Lutheran work ethos. I am committed to making prints as a contribution to society regardless of my doubts, yet I do wonder if, as O’Connor writes, that
‘Art makes apologies for its failures to act directly. Art could not do so even if it wanted to. Surely the political impact even of so called committed art is highly uncertain.’ (2000: 249)