Clare Romano

Summer Calm, 1995

Monotype

Image size: 30" x 22"

Paper size: 30" x 22"

Estimated value: $1500

Printed by the artist

Clare Romano (1922-2017) was trained as a painter at The Cooper Union in New York City. She made her first prints at Robert Blackburn's Creative Lithographic Workshop in 1949. Her early urban subjects were replaced by landscapes when she left New York City for New Jersey and the towns of Truro and Provincetown on Cape Cod, MA, where she and her family lived and spent their summers. She also switched her allegiance to the woodcut, developing imagery first in her paintings and drawings. Romano's woodcuts show her appreciation for the texture of the wood block, and her penchant for creating a varied printed surface. In 1958, while in Italy on a Fulbright Grant, she began to use cardboard and paper to build her relief plates; and during a residence in Yugoslavia with the U.S. Information Agency in 1965-66, she perfected the collagraph technique, whereby she collaged materials (cardboard, cloth, found objects) onto the printing plate with a modeling paste.

Romano has introduced generations of students to all aspects of printmaking as a professor at the New School of Social Research, NY; Pratt Graphics Center; and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Clare Romano, along with her husband John Ross, co-authored the classic The Complete Printmaker in 1972 followed by The Complete Screen Print and Lithograph (1974), The Complete Relief Print (1974), The Complete New Techniques in Printmaking (1974) , The Complete Intaglio Print (1974) and The Complete Collagraph (1980). The Revised, Expanded Edition of The Complete Printmaker was released in 1991 was co-authored with their son Tim Ross.