Bouquet                             
2008
Engraving                                           

Evan Lindquist            
Residence: Jonesboro, Arkansas, United States
Birthplace: Salina, Kansas, United States

When I was very young, my parents encouraged me to make marks in imitation of my father’s elegant Ornamental Penmanship. Those lines, and the copperplate style of penmanship, have continued to be part of my way of seeing for more than 65 years.

Following several years of making childish lines with ink pens, I began a professional career as a calligrapher. In 1955, I began experimenting with a burin, learning to engrave lines, crudely, into plates of copper.

I’ve learned from everybody. My favorite artists always seemed to be the old master printmakers whose surviving images were comments on society and the human condition, as they perceived it. I am most indebted to these old master printmakers: Goya, Rembrandt, Dürer, Lucas van Leyden, Hogarth, Daumier, Gillray, Tiepolo, & Whistler.

I was born during The Great Depression in Salina, Kansas, close to where my Swedish pioneer ancestors had homesteaded. I majored in both Art and Biology at Emporia State University. I taught Biology Labs in the Biology Department and worked as Staff Artist in Graphic Arts and Printing. In 1960, at the University of Iowa, I began graduate studies with Mauricio Lasansky in Printmaking.

I’ve been richly rewarded in life by having teachers in both Art and Biology who cared about giving me the best they had to offer. In 1963, with my new MFA diploma in hand, I began teaching Art & Printmaking at Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. I retired 40 years later, and in 2004, I was honored to receive the Arkansas Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award and an Emporia State University Distinguished Alumni Award.

Each of my prints begins as a rough sketch in a small sketchbook that fits into my shirt pocket. I nearly always use an old vintage fountain pen for sketching. Later, I enlarge the idea and refine the composition with tracing paper before transferring some graphite guidelines onto the copper plate. The idea develops directly on the copper plate during my process of engraving.

The image is engraved with a burin, by hand, into the copper plate. The burin is a natural source for calligraphic lines which usually function as contour lines in my compositions. Value-shapes consist of carefully controlled masses of parallel and [sometimes] string-like structural lines. The engraved copper plate was inked with black ink and wiped by hand in the traditional process of intaglio printing. Paper was impressed into the lines on an etching press to transfer the ink.

All impressions are personally pulled by me in my private studio in Jonesboro, Arkansas. My press is a hand-powered etching press, designed by Andrew Rush, made in 1963 by Fredy Re’em at Bottega D’Arte Grafica, Via Degli Aristi, 6, in Florence, Italy.

The ink is Graphic Chemical Frankfort Black No. 2275, manufactured from my original formula, which I developed for my own use in the 1960s and ‘70s. The ink is now available worldwide from Graphic Chemical and Ink Company in Villa Park, Illinois.

Evan Lindquist is one of a few late twentieth century American printmakers who concentrated on the medium of copper plate burin engraving. A native of Kansas, he earned the Master of Fine Arts degree in 1963 from The University of Iowa, in Iowa City, Iowa. In 1958, he received the BSE degree at Emporia State University, in Emporia, Kansas. In 2003, Lindquist retired as Emeritus Professor of Art from Arkansas State University-Jonesboro, where he had taught printmaking and drawing for forty years. In 1981, he was honored as Outstanding Faculty Member and appointed to be first Chairman of the President’s Fellows. His home and private studio are in Jonesboro, Arkansas.

In 2004, he received the Arkansas Governor’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Emporia State University Distinguished Alumni Award.

Lindquist has had more than 50 solo exhibitions and received more than 50 awards, in over 300 competitive exhibitions, while being included in a long list of public collections, including: The Albertina in Vienna, Austria; the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Arkansas; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Uffizi in Florence, Italy; the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Dublin Museum of Modern Art in Ireland; & the Whitney Museum of American Art; among many others.