VOORHEESVILLE — Thom O’Connor, a printmaker, is ready for the future.
"I think art students, as printmakers, should understand and experience the fundamental things. It’s hard and true," O’Connor said. "But, if that’s all they know, then I feel sorry for them, because things are going to change."

In a career that has spanned five decades, O’Connor has ridden the crest of the wave of change in the art world. His technique has gone from etching, to chemical-based lithography, to photo-polymer. Now, his operation is digital.

O’Connor speaks excitedly about the future. Among other things, he envisions high-definition TV’s standing in for canvas on collectors’ walls and artists selling CD’s of their work like musicians.
"I think it’s a useful and interesting thing that has happened," O’Connor said of the computer revolution of the past two decades. "It gives you the opportunity to work with things in a way that is now. It’s about now."

O’Connor spoke to The Enterprise from his home in Voorheesville. He and his wife built the modern building in the woods in the sixties, after O’Connor came to the area to teach art at the University at Albany. Now retired from teaching, O’Connor splits his year between Voorheesville and Florida.
His print, "The Faucet," joins 70 other works by local artists at the Albany Institute of History and Art’s exhibit, Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region, through Sept. 4. O’Connor’s piece won the University at Albany’s University Art Museum Purchase Prize.

The Albany exhibit, however, is hardly the apex of his career. O’Connor has had prints shown at galleries and exhibitions on five continents, and has work in the collections of several major American art museums, including the Smithsonian, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the San Diego Art Museum, and the Library of Congress.

O’Connor, however, claims very little connection to his pieces in far-flung corners of the world. He’s already thinking about his next work.
"When you finish something, that dictates the possibility of a number of different possibilities," O’Connor said. "What can develop from the ideas that exist in that image that can evolve into other images""

From Detroit to Albany

O’Connor, born in Detroit in 1937, took art classes as a child twice a week at the Detroit Art Institute, but, when he started college at the University of Michigan, he didn’t think of making it a career.
"I thought, ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ It sort of came on like an ambush," O’Connor said.

He was pre-med at first, he said, learning chemistry skills that would come in handy later on in his art.

After transferring to Florida State University, O’Connor gained a mentor: Karl Zerbe, the authority on the oldest form of painting, encaustic painting, which uses hot wax. It does not escape O’Connor that he and his mentor have spent their careers moving towards the opposite ends of history.

At that time, O’Connor said, if Florida State art students wanted to go to graduate school, they didn’t have much of a choice; Zerbe would send them to Yale, the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco, or Cranbrook Academy of Art in Detroit. Though he was hoping for somewhere else, O’Connor headed back to his depressed home city, to Cranbrook.
"It was like going home," O’Connor said. "I was a little reluctant."

After earning a master of fine arts degree from Cranbrook, O’Connor came to teach at the University at Albany, which was changing from a teachers’ college to a full-fledged university. Altamont’s Ed Cowley was head of the art department then.

O’Connor admires Cowley and remembers how Cowley let him spend six months at a lithography workshop in Los Angeles in only his second year of teaching.
"Ed was the kind of guy who realized that there was good stuff for the university people around the world," he said.

"Lush and seductive"

To O’Connor, art is more than a process.
"I’m interested in the image. How you get there, who cares"" he said.

O’Connor became interested in printmaking, the art of transference, in graduate school. He claims Eastern Europe as the source of much of his technique.

In printmaking, an image is taken from one surface and moved to another. The final product, the print, is considered a work of art in its own right, not just a copy.

Older forms involve wood, ink, metal, acid, and toxic chemicals. More recently, artists have been using photo-polymer plates, pioneered in Denmark, which involve projecting an image onto a light-sensitive compound.

Though O’Connor has used all these techniques in his career, and still does, he talks mostly of digital printmaking. His computer monitors replace wood and metal plates, and, instead of spreading ink by hand, he prints images with high-quality inkjet printers. Instead of altering images with toxic chemicals or through photographic tricks, O’Connor uses a computer program.

And with the computer, O’Connor has returned the focus of his art to objects after a long period of abstraction.
"It was really always about an object or a landscape, but I just abstracted them," O’Connor said. "I often wonder what happened to all those objects in the seventies and eighties. Where did they go""

First, O’Connor takes a picture of an object with a digital camera, usually just something around the house: a rug, a rose, a faucet. Then, he manipulates the picture with Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop plugins provided by a California company that does effects for movies.

The resulting prints range from tiny to very large, and, in his basement studio, O’Connor has all sizes spread over the tables and workbenches. He’s intrigued by how size changes an image, especially a digital one.

He points out a print of a slice of cake. As the image gets larger, it breaks down into points of color, giving it a kinetic, filmic quality up close, while retaining its shape like an impressionistic painting far away.
"It was really quite beautiful when it fell apart," O’Connor said. "When it didn’t fall apart, when it was quite small, it was a different type of thing."

O’Connor uses high-end Epson inkjet printers to print his images. The smaller pieces he can print himself, while the larger ones he sends out to a couple in Connecticut to be printed on huge machines, but still inkjets.

Subtleties between the inks allow him to experiment with different shades of color. In one print, a red rose emerges from a dense field of black, a recurring theme in O’Connor’s work. Another, of dishes, is all shades of gray, with no white.

For a period in his career, O’Connor did everything in black and white.
"It has the most lush, seductive quality that I have found," he said.

Now, the color is back, but lush and seductive is still the goal.

O’Connor realizes that some purists don’t approve of his computerized methods.
"For somebody that draws, they’re all pissed off about that. They think that’s too easy a way," he said.

But, he said, it will pass.
"It’s a tool, just like I use tools when I draw," O’Connor said.