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    Museum of Arts Artist Talks: Scott Schnepf on printmaking

    Museum of Arts Artist Talks: Scott Schnepf on printmaking

    The Museum of Art at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) is currently exhibiting Scott Schnepf’s “Four Decades of Printmaking.” From Nov. 1 to Dec. 16, students, faculty and visitors can attend the exhibit and view the 43 prints Schnepf lent to the museum.
    On Nov. 28 from 12:10 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., Schnepf came to the Museum of Art located in the Paul Creative Art Center to engage in an interactive conversation with viewers. The event drew about 30 attendees.
    Working at UNH from 1981 to 2015, Schnepf served 34 years in the art department. For six of those years, he was appointed chairperson of the department. His website explains that as a professor, he taught all levels of printmaking, drawing and painting and that in 2008 he received the Lindberg Award for outstanding teaching and scholarship within the College of Liberal Arts.
    Schnepf says he limited the gallery to prints rather than other mediums of art. As he says, “I’ve always considered myself a printmaker first and foremost. It was my first love.” In college, Schnepf originally studied math, but switched his major after taking his first printmaking class in 1972.
    Schnepf limited the works in the gallery to only pieces he created throughout his years at UNH. A variety of printmaking techniques line the walls of the Museum of Art including
    reduction woodcut, engraving, mezzo-tint, etching and multi-plate etching.
    Senior studio art major Daniel Faiella found out about the event through the art department and has admired the exhibit over the past few weeks while anxiously anticipating the artist talk in order to learn more about the field.
    Faiella said that what he enjoyed most about the exhibit was “what Schnepf had to say about the process of printmaking.” He went on to explain it was “because I honestly took one print making class and had a lot of trouble with the process. He talked about it in relation to painting which I found interesting because I am a painter and I much prefer the process of oil painting. It makes me sad that I never got to take a course with him; he retired when I started school.”
    Another attendee, Alayna Blodgett, a junior sociology major with an art minor, went to the event because artist talks are a required part of her photography course.
    After listening to Schnepf’s talk, Blodgett said, “I enjoyed learning about the process. It definitely takes a lot of dedication. I’ve done printmaking before, but not this large-scale and never these many types of prints. So, definitely learning about the process and the different kind of styles was very interesting.”
    Whether it be printmaking or photography, the process of creating is often a difficult and rewarding task, one that makes exhibits like Schnepf’s such a success.
    As Schnepf said, “A visual artist is completely masking their tracks, so even they don’t know where they started.”

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