Warrington Colescott: Printmaker
American artist, Warrington Colescott, is widely known for his printmaking and etchings that typically have a dark humorous twist. Colescott was born March 7th, 1921, in Oakland, California and was of Louisiana Creole descent. From an early age, Colescott experienced many things that would later influence his art style. Colescott enjoyed many comic strips as a young boy, especially the comic strips of Jay “Ding” Darling, which had a strong narrative and a caricatural style. At Red Mill and Moulin Rouge Theater on 8th Street in Oakland, Colescott saw burlesque shows and experienced the slapstick humor present at Vaudeville shows. Both performances would alter the comical aspect of his future work. His Creole heritage also played a big role in forming his humor.
Colescott received his undergraduate degree in fine arts from the University of California-Berkeley in the summer of 1942. Colescott worked on the university humor magazine, The Pelican, as well as the university newspaper, The Daily Californian, sending in cartoons and writings. After graduating, Colescott served in the army during WWII in Okinawa and Korea until 1946. Following his return from war, Colescott earned his master's degree in fine arts and received a teaching certificate from UC-Berkeley. For two years, Colescott taught at Long Beach City College until 1949. He then started his 37-year long career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in September of 1949, retiring in 1986. While at UW-Madison, art faculty member Alfred Sessler changed the direction of Colescott’s career by introducing him to etching in the mid-1950s. Colescott furthered his art education at many places in Europe on fellowships and grants. He specifically learned more about etching and screen-printing at Slade School of Fine Art in London, under Anthony Gross, an extremely knowledgeable printmaker. He experimented with hard-ground etching and combining etching with screen-printing.
"Etching quickens the blood, lights up the eye, affects the satirical mind in the same way that a low-cut neckline affects Dracula”
(Colescott, 1996, written in a catalog for his exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum).
By the 1960s, Colescott was focused only on etching and depicting his satirical narratives, shying away from his previous abstract style. He explored more complexities in color and discovered he could use mechanics’ shears to cut and shape copper etching plates. Prime Time Histories: Colescott’s USA (1972-73) and The History of Printmaking (1975-78) became some of Colescott’s most well-known series. He combined historical fact with his own interpretation of the event, while borrowing themes and styles from the artists he was featuring in the prints.
As time went on, Colescott focused a lot of his work on conflict, protest, pop culture, burlesque, the afterlife, and places that were meaningful to him (California, Wisconsin, New Orleans). Colescott’s work is spread across the US and Europe, with a big concentration of it in Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Art Museum has over 250 prints, drawings, and paintings from Colescott, the largest collection of his work in the world. Colescott and his wife, Frances Myers, operated the Mantegna Press in Hollandale, Wisconsin together. Colescott passed away in 2018 in Hollandale, Wisconsin at the age of 97, after years of making satirical, historical, and rebellious prints.
Etching is a very tedious, time consuming process. It falls under intaglio printmaking, which is the process of engraving into a material. For the etching process, acid is used to carve lines into a metal plate that will then hold the ink for printmaking. The intense process often influenced the subject matter of Colescott's work.
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“The process has a way of getting into your mind and influencing the direction of your ideas. Corrosive materials beget corrosive thoughts. When your face is enclosed in a fume respirator, while your gloved hands are dropping splats of nitric acid onto an aquatint and your creative marks are sizzling and fuming, you do not think of images such as 'lovers riding into the pale moonlight'"
(Warrington Colescott, “Artist’s Statement.” In Warrington Colescott, ed. Margaret Andera (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1996).
Out My Garden Window paints a picture of Madison, Wisconsin in the late sixties. With the University’s ties to the Vietnam War, many protests were taking place on and around campus. After driving through a riot near campus, Colescott was inspired to make his print based on the events he saw unfold. There is a large procession of people peacefully protesting in the background, a plume of tear gas, and a police officer detaining a protester in the front of the print with his baton raised. Colescott put an array of different types of people in this print, from students, reporters, farmers, and hippies to some of his signature characters - burlesque dancers and a Klansman. “Everyone was there, so I tried to put every man – every man was in here, you know: the cook, and the baker and the candlestick maker, and the students all being taken off to jail” (Colescott, Oral History Project Interview, Tape 4.).
"When the audience is nervous and needs mirrors to see how they’re doing, when they need a little help in understanding what’s really going on, that’s when the satirists thrive. War, depression, social upheaval, riots, rebellion, political assassination, are driving forces for comic cuts. Sadly, I have lived through all those events. Some terrible moments have been recorded in my prints…I watch our world and try to find a way to reference it in my reactions"
(Colescott and Hove, Progressive Printmakers, 57).
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