Printmakers Like Rabbits Stunned in Headlight Beams

At left, "Behemoth and Leviathan" by William Blake--Fine-art printmakers today are facing challenges of sea-change magnitude. The very existence of printmaking as we know it is at stake. The issue, of course, is digital and we should have seen it coming. In fact, many of us did but remained inert, like rabbits stunned in headlight beams. “Digital” has been everybody’s issue since the electronic scientific calculator replaced the slide rule in the mid 1970s. Computers changed everything. They brought us an ever-growing set of delightful mod cons but along the way they took a terrible toll on printmaking, threatening print artists’ livelihoods…