Frontiers D

About the Work

From the Artist

I get some really interesting effects that come from photography, I get some really interesting effects that come from painting. And there’s a relationship between the printing process, the painting process, and then the next stage, which I call the improvisation process, slowly conceiving a landscape that will fit the irregular cuts that have been made into the prints.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}

Frank Hyder's Frontiers series extends and translates an innovative collage-like approach he first developed for painting into a new medium: printmaking. In his Frontiers series, Hyder took digital images—often of human faces—shot from existing original painted works, printed them on tracing paper, cut them, and then pasted the resulting fragments onto translucent mylar. He completed the process by painting on the mylar invented forest-like landscapes—"frontiers"— that surrounded and incorporated the digital fragments.

During his residency at Brandywine Workshop and Archives, Philadelphia, Hyder translated the creative sensibility, imagery (such as faces peering through a forest's dense foliage toward the viewer) and composition of his Frontier series—and evoked other aspects of their formal qualities, such as texture—into offset lithograph relief prints.
_{—From Brandywine Workshop and Archives records}