Catalogs & Prints Section
Faith and intuition guide the journey to a stopping point, a place where something unexpected comes into being bearing a richness and clarity that is more than the materials of their making. Ron Rumford
With the discipline of minimalism, the bravura of process, and the alluring sensuality of color field, Ron Rumford embraces happenstance as the hierarchical operative in his work. It has been said of Mr. Rumford that he “revels in surprise,” seemingly counter-intuitive to the rigors of printmaking. As careful planning and intuition coincide, Mr. Rumford allows the press to determine “what comes next.” The result is an expansive body of work, in a plethora of media, that is nothing short of magical.
The self-described “happy accident” was integral to the creation of Susan and Dean. Mr. Rumford partnered with renowned artist Ryan Parker in the printing of the edition initially in his Philadelphia studio. With earnest expectations of completion in 9 months, the artists succumbed to unanticipated interruptions; weathering, even thriving from the obstructions, the fortuitous printing partnership lasted 2 ½ years. The early delays demanded the fabrication of a new ink through arduous trial and error to replace the recently discontinued Daniel Smith green. For expediency’s sake, Mr. Rumford agreed to the suggested shift from collagraph and linocut matrices to screenprints. Hardly a concession, he accepted the new ink as a “gift,” the alternate green enhancing rather than obscuring the translucency of the overall color structure, well suited to the screenprinting.
The project then unexpectedly moved west as Mr. Parker received a fellowship to the prestigious print-making department at the University of Iowa, with the full endorsement of Mr. Rumford. There Susan and Dean approached the final and most challenging and conceivably precarious stage, the final step of printing the intaglio plate. The salient issue at hand was the need to effectively balance the “chatter,” the shallow textural marks inherent in the plate, with the arcing, dominating lines. The frustrating struggles resolved in an elegant solution; screen-printing the chatter and investigating new material for the intaglio of the mesmerizing loops. Throughout his career, Mr. Rumford has relished the search for and experimentation with unconventional materials. Rejecting the instability of a plexi plate, the artists embraced Sintra, a high-quality PVC board which Mr. Parker covered with coats of shellac to allow for the clear and consistent printing of the lines. The culmination of the relentless but exhilarating journey of breathing life into Susan and Dean was mounting the prints on diaphanous Kitataka paper onto white wove, abetting the luminescence of the lush colors.
The joy of the journey, with an abundance of curiosity about and a hearty vulnerability to the endless possibilities of materials and techniques has fueled Ron Rumford since his undergraduate years at the University of Pennsylvania’s Tyler School of Art, where he earned a BFA in 1984. An established Philadelphia artist, his works on paper, prints, watercolor and crayon, gouache, are internationally exhibited and included in major public collections. That curiosity and technical courage led him in 1998 to pioneer a non-traditional material in printmaking, a matrix of polymer clay. Inventively rolling out the clay into thin sheets facilitated an undulating texture that transferred to intaglio monoprint, again that unanticipated surprise inherent in intense creativity.
Affiliated with Philadelphia’s Dolan Maxwell gallery since 1985, Mr. Rumford has served as its director since 1990. As the ellipses in Mr. Rumford’s Susan and Dean gracefully interconnect, so has his decade’s long association with the Print Club of Cleveland. To honor that relationship, he has aptly entitled the work after the Trillings, husband and wife, among the Club’s beloved and esteemed members. The strength of the sentiment is commensurate to the virtuosity and the studied technical abandon comprising Ron Rumford’s 2020 Publication Print for the Print Club of Cleveland.
By Darlene Michitsch