The satire, light and dark humor, irony and social criticism in Lynwood's work always gave me something to take away from the print and to think about later, to ponder the deeper meaning of the work.
Warrington Colescott 1
Lynwood Kreneck's prints are technically magisterial, formally inventive, and humorous. Certainly there is a substantial history of humor, satire, irony and social criticism in printmaking, but neither is humor a commonly predicated attribute of artworks. Humor in artworks, as Warrington Colescott implies, is not in a simple, binary opposition with serious content. Thus in Kreneck's prints, humor is not the antithesis of the serious, but is the vehicle for serious content.
In Fabrications of the Wild West, objects are arrayed on a tile countertop or on a tiled floor. The scale of the objects is somewhat ambiguous: the represented objects may be toys—which Kreneck collects—or representations of full scale objects. Whether toys representing objects or the print qua image as a representation of objects per se, the objects represented are themselves of contradictory scale if literal mimesis is the criterion of non-contradiction. But of course it is not the criterion; compositional considerations and hierarchical scale take precedence over mimesis in these works. So there is a very large six-shooter resting on top of a hat-like form placed on a skeletal head and torso, with a carved Mayan head in the right foreground, with a hammer on the ground plane and a saw leaning against the wall. An image of a head in profile, suggestive of the Native American in profile on a Big Chief elementary school writing tablet of the 1950's and earlier, forms an embedded image 2 on the right rear wall plane. A 'fabrication' is something made, so on one level Fabrications of the Old West has as a referent of 'fabrications' things made, but as 'fabrication' also has the sense of something made up, Fabrications of the Old West also has as its referent an invented explanatory narrative, as Lyotard would have it, 3 that may be less than entirely truthful: a 'story,' as my grandmother's euphemism for a lie would have it. It is this latter sense that underwrites reading Fabrications of the Old West as social critique, and the play between the two senses that conduces to but does not exhaust its humor.
More universally, Clown's Long Swim is a parable of life: the artist's life, everyone's life. A clown, clothed in typical clown attire yet remarkably dry, swims through an ocean with a skull in the foreground and an hourglass in the middle distance. Along with these memento mori motifs, a winged griffin, reminiscent of the flying figure in Dürer's Melancholia flies overhead, emblazoned with the text Ars Longa, abbreviated from Vita Brevis, Ars Longa: "Life is short, art endures." The clown's swimming seems endless, the horizon in the background has the rays of a setting sun, but no sight of a possible landfall. Yet if the work is humorous largely by virtue of the capacity of clowns to evoke humor even in sad circumstance, it is nevertheless oddly hopeful: the clown is resolved, stoic in his seemingly endless swimming. Such humor as obtains also serves here, as in the other works, as a self-deprecating foil for the technical perfection of the execution of Kreneck's prints.
Kreneck exploits the capability of screenprinting to yield intense and richly subtle color. Historically, the widespread use of color in printmaking is relatively recent. At the time Kreneck completed the Master of Fine Arts and began his professional career as an artist and educator, most prints were black and white, although certainly a number of printmakers—notably Stanley William Hayter, Glen Alps, and Mauricio Lasansky—were using color. Still, it was not until the 1960's that color, and particularly intense color, began to become common in printmaking, under the pressure of Pop, the expanding production of prints in contract shops, and the growth of university printmaking programs, where an environment open to pushing the boundaries of the medium existed, free from limiting preconceptions of the how a print ought to look. Kreneck's work contributed to the expansion of color in print media during this period and later, as did his efforts as founding curator of the Colorprint USA series of exhibitions.
Indeed, Kreneck's advocacy of screenprinting as a medium for artists use, and his instrumental role in the development of water-based screenprinting ink, are of a piece with his championing of color in printmaking. The No Prints are an extension of his innovations in water-based screenprinting. The water-based inks from the initial screenprint step in the No Prints is washed away, so that only the Prismacolor drawing subsequently added over the screenprinted water-based ink remains. 4
In the No Print Clown in the Rich Kitchen, the luminosity of the color derives much of its impact from the black substrate revealed when the water-based screenprinted ink is washed from the subsequently drawn passages. The impact of the image benefits from this luminosity, but is not solely contingent on it. Rather, the impact of the work is also contingent on the strength of the composition and the nuances of content to which the composition gives form. For if we are all clown in a rich kitchen, it is an image "wherein to catch the conscious of our kings." 5
Lynwood Kreneck is Professor Emeritus of Art at Texas Tech University, where he taught printmaking for nearly forty years. His distinguished career includes over 150 national and international exhibitions. Kreneck is represented in numerous private collections and over forty public collections, among them the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Museum of Art, Antwerp, and the Stedelijke Musea, Belgium. He is founding curator of the significant exhibition series Colorprint USA, which has exhibited a 'Who's Who' of printmaking since its inception in 1967. Kreneck was instrumental in the development of water-based screenprint inks and methods, which has revolutionized screenprinting by artists and greatly enhanced its safety, and is the inventor of the No print process. He received the Bachelor of Fine Arts and the Master of Fine Arts from The University of Texas at Austin.