James Moravec

I attended the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana to study architecture in the mid 1970’s. After graduating, I moved to Madison Wisconsin to begin a career in architecture with a goal to change the world with my architectural design skills.

All of my adult life I have been an amateur photographer, beginning with black and white film and a darkroom and eventually transitioning to digital with computer post processing. A friend introduced me to black and white photography, as a matter of necessity. I needed to produce images of completed architectural study models for inclusion into my graduate school application portfolio. However, after I was later given my first SLR camera, I grew to love the hobby and over the years my photographic interests expanded into other directions and types of images.

I eventually retired after 40 plus years as an architect. I never became world famous, but was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to design numerous buildings within the Madison area and throughout Wisconsin. After retirement, I needed to find a new direction to satisfy my creative urges. Having always been attracted to the composition and graphic nature of screen-printing and having more free time during the pandemic, I began down the printing path.

So, in the fall of 2020, I set out to learn the art of screen-printing. I had been exposed to the process in a small way back in college, so I knew the general approach. I developed a studio in my home by modifying my darkroom to also handle exposing and cleaning of the screens. I also constructed the equipment needed for printing, including the vacuum table and screens to be used in the process.

Up to this point in my journey, all of my screen-prints have started with a photograph. In traditional photography, capturing the negative or digital image is only the starting point to developing a finished photograph. How the negative or digital file is processed determines the final result. I look at the process of screen-printing as just another way to interpret the image and “print” the photograph.

One of the fun challenges of my process is how to simplify the photographic image in preparation for screen- printing. Simplifying the image requires you to declare to the viewer what parts of the original image are most important to you. Parts or details that you leave out of an image can be as important as those that remain.

Another aspect of screen-printing that I particularly like is the ability to create a number of prints of the same image, each one slightly unique. As an architect, I could work a long time on designing a single building for a client. For larger projects, this timeframe might be several years between starting the design and when a project was completed. Since each situation and client was different, the result was typically unique. Many times over the years I dreamed about doing something different, about creating something that could be reproduced more than once. There is a palatable thrill to create multiple versions of an image.

So far, it’s been an exciting journey. Thanks for looking at my work and I hope some of it inspires you to become a screen-printing fan.