The process of printmaking puts the emphasis on precision. If the print doesn’t come out the way the artist or client wants it to, if something goes wrong and images wind up murky, overprinted or the wrong color, the printmaker goes back and does it again and again until the work is error-free.
Stewart Crone finds beauty in those errors. He also finds beauty in the mechanical activities done every day to prime and test the printers or clean out the fountains between jobs
“They’re called waste, or make-readies. These things go directly into the trash,” Crone says. “I like them. They have odd, abstract elements and images printed over and over again until a certain kind of chaos emerges. To my mind, it’s an elegant kind of chaos.”
An exhibit of Crone’s “mistakes” are on exhibit in the Real Room at Real Art Ways. “Pinned to the Wall” can be viewed until Sept. 16.
Crone began plucking the “waste” out of the garbage about 40 years ago and since then has amassed a collection of pieces. Sometimes he alters them. Others he leaves alone.
The images are wide-ranging and most have nothing to do with each other: images from beauty ads, corporate guidebooks, clip art, blocks of text, streaks of color, smudgy stains.
A few items were intentionally created by Crone but share the aesthetic of jumbled, seemingly random mistakes. A three-part digital collage mashes up themes of the Virgin Mary, artist Cy Twombly and 19th-century French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
Crone likes the randomness of the selection curated by his friend, Peter Waite, and he doesn’t care if visitors can’t agree on the quality of the work. “Good? Bad? It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes. The art world is extremely arbitrary about what’s good and what’s bad,” he said. “It’s really just the eye of the beholder.”
This is the first solo exhibit by Crone, who lives in Manchester.
“I spent 40 years fixing errors,” he says. “Now I want to celebrate the error a little bit.” realartways.org.
