Glen Alps

Artists who predated Alps in the use of this concept include the Norwegian Rolf Nesch and the Americans Boris Margo (1902–1995), Edmond Casarella (1920–1996) and Roland Ginzel (b. 1921).

Among his colleagues in the Art Department were the painters Wendell Brazeau (1910–1974), Boyer Gonzales (1909–1987), Alden Mason (b. 1919) and Spencer Moseley (1936–1998); modernist jewelry designer and craftsman, Ruth Pennington (1905–1998) and sculptor George Tsutakawa (1910–1997).

Glen Alps (1914-1996) was a printmaker and educator who is credited with having developed the collagraph.

A collagraph is a print whose plate is a board or other substrate onto which textured materials are glued.

The plate may be inked for printing in either the intaglio or the relief manner and then printed onto paper.

Alps was born in 1914 on a farm near Loveland, Colorado.

During that summer Alps studied with printmaker Mauricio Lasansky (b. 1914) at the University of Iowa.

Artists who later created notable works in collagraphy include Dean Meeker (1920–2002), Edward Stasack (b. 1929), John Ross (1921 - 2017) and Claire Romano (1922 - 2017).

Alps, along with Romano and Ross were all members of Society of American Graphic Artists.

Alps was actively engaged in promoting as well as producing collagraphs.

Alps's students include the printmaker and painter Barbara Bruch, printmaker, basket weaver and glass artist Joe Feddersen, printmaker Gerald Ferstman, the painters and collaborative sculptors Tom Northington and Mary Rothermel; assemblage and mosaic artist Glen Michaels (b. 1927), painter and sculptor James W. Washington, Jr. (1908-2002) and lithographer and abstract painter James Claussen.

By many accounts Alps was an inspirational teacher.

He attended Colorado State College of Education (today University of Northern Colorado) in Greeley, Colorado, where he received the Bachelor of Arts in 1940.

Bill Ritchie (b. 1941), multimedia artist, also taught printmaking until 1984.

After graduation he worked as an art instructor in the Greeley County school system until 1942, when he took a job in the publishing department of Culver Aircraft Factory in Wichita.

In 1945 he returned to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was awarded the Master of Fine Arts in 1947.

Alps's early work in printmaking was in keeping with the realism of American Regionalists Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, but by the end of 1947 his work had turned toward abstraction and vivid color, judiciously used.

The excitement of printmaking for Alps was in the creative process.

He preferred small editions to large ones, and was prolific in his production.

At this time he worked in lithography, screenprinting and etching.

A favorite abstract motif was the circle in a square which, according to arts reviewer John Voorhees, became a type of "trademark" for the artist that he often used in his work.

Glen Alps began teaching in the Art Department of the University of Washington while he was still a graduate student there.

In 1947 the chairman of the department, Walter F. Jacobs, invited Alps to teach classes in watercolor and design as an acting associate of the school.

He soon began teaching printmaking, as well.

After graduation Alps's teaching career at the University of Washington continued.

He received tenure in 1954 and became a full professor in 1962.

Although the inventor of the process is not known, Alps made collagraphy his primary art form and coined the word "collagraph" in 1956.

He disseminated the techniques he developed for making collagraphs during his long career as both an artist and a teacher.

Alps began working in the technique in the fall of 1956, when he was an associate professor in the School of Art at the University of Washington.

He was investigating art techniques that would stimulate creativity and, as he wrote, "...dramatically release the inner-most quality of being" of the artist.

Alps shared the idea with his students at that time, and they became his colleagues in experimenting with the new art form.

It became evident to Alps early on in his development of the process that he needed a name for it.

The word that he coined,"collagraph", is a union of the words "collage" and "-graph."

The first exhibition to show collagraphs by Alps and his students was a competitive print exhibition held in 1957 at the University of Washington's Henry Gallery.

The first national exposure of a collagraph came in 1958, when Alps's "Chickens, Collagraph #12" was exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum's National Print Annual.

In 1966 he demonstrated techniques used in making collagraphs in a 20-minute film titled "The Collagraph."

In a 1981 interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (SAAM), Glen Michaels remembered Alps as "the one who opened my eyes to Op Art. His whole design concept was optical illusion, taking a flat surface and turning it into a sculptural thing. Experiments that he was doing that were so fertile and so exciting I’ve never seen anything like since."

Writers on the subject of collagraphy are careful to point out that while Glen Alps developed the artform and coined the term "collagraph" to describe it, he did not "invent" collagraphy.

He was named Professor Emeritus upon his retirement from teaching in 1984.

Elementary collagraphic techniques can be detected in prints dating from the 19th century, and the development in the early 20th century of collage as an art form led to the idea that objects (including bits of paper, fabric, metal and sand) collaged on to a printing plate could be inked and printed for textural effects.