Last Sunday afternoon, a group of 27 artists, art aficionados and
curious bystanders crowded into the parking lot of Atelier 6000 - a
small art studio/workshop in the Old Mill District whose name was
derived from the French word for "workshop"-to watch an enormous
steamroller run over wooden plates that the artists spent as many as
four weeks working on. With the very real chance that the steamroller
would crush the plates and leave nothing but a mess of paint, wood
splinters and carpet padding, the crowd anxiously waited for the
steamroller to back away from the printing surface. Owner Pat Clark
along with Bruce Emerson and artist Dawn Emerson approached the area,
pulled back the padding and lifted the large white sheets of paper from
the plate. Emerson's design, a horse, survived the steamroller's
crushing weight and the resulting print drew applause and "oohs" and
"aahs" from the crowd.
Clark, an emeritus professor from the
California State system on a "failed retirement" says she wanted to do
an event like this because it gave artists an opportunity to create
prints on a larger scale and showed the community another side of print
making.
