Janet Doub Erickson
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[edit] Block Printer, Author, and Graphic Artist
Janet Doub Erickson is an American graphic artist and writer who popularized linoleum-block and woodblock printing in the post-World War II period, both through her art and through her writings. Born to a pioneering Western Maryland farming family (the Doub (family)) in Hagerstown, Maryland in 1924. She spent her early years in Boonsboro, Maryland, where her father’s ancestors had settled in 1720 and subsequently farmed continuously. She moved to New England in the nineteen thirties to be closer to her mother’s family, which was of colonial Yankee descent. She disastrously returned to the south during the nineteen thirties, and after dropping out of the University of Mary Washington, Erickson attended the Massachusetts College of Art, graduating in the nineteen forties, and founded with partner Paul Coombs “Blockhouse of Boston” soon thereafter, achieving commercial success with her innovative approaches to block-printing. After marrying author Evarts Erickson in the 1950s she moved to Mexico for several years with a fellowship from The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.[1] In Guadalajara and then Oaxaca she studied Mexican printmaking techniques and had several children, subsequently returning to a professorship in the United States [2].
Profiled and photographed by Gjon Mili in the now defunct newsweekly Life in 1951 [3], she was nicknamed “Jumping Janet” for her practice of jumping on her linoleum and wood blocks to make the ink stick deeper into the textiles she was printing. She was also the subject of profiles in the art magazines Craft Horizons [4] and American Artist [5], and won a first prize in textile design from the American Craftsmen's Council in 1954. In 1961 Erickson wrote Blockprinting on Textiles [6] (which went into two editions and a number of printings). A 1966 book she co-wrote with Adelaide Sproul, Printmaking Without A Press[7] popularized both traditional and her own more innovative linoleum and wood-cut printing techniques at a time when block printing was on the verge of extinction in the United States. Fortuitously timed with a renaissance in interest in traditional crafts during the sixties, the book further spurred interest in Janet Doub Erickson's art. In 1989 she published her early line drawings in the retrospective book Drawings of Old Boston Houses [8]. Her prints, drawings, and paintings have been purchased for the permanent collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Saudi Arabian Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu. (She lived in the Middle East for a number of years.) She is also represented in private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
In the nineteen sixties she moved to California, where she lived for more than a decade prior to moving to Croatia (then-Yugoslavia), then Venice, Italy, and finally to the Middle East, before returning to California. In 2001 moved to her long-time summer residence on Cape Cod, where she currently resides, and did historical research on New England vernacular housing. Now retired as a printmaker, in recent years she has written for a variety of textile and architectural magazines, and is currently a member of the Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Historical Commission [9].
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.louiscomforttiffanyfoundation.org; "Tiffany scholarships in painting were awarded to..in graphic arts..to Janet Doub..." (http://www.archive.org/stream/newinternational008502mbp/newinternational008502mbp_djvu.txt).
- ^ From 1955-1959 at SUNY Buffalo New York
- ^ Life Magazine, July 9th, 1951, Gjon Mili
- ^ Craft Horizons, Feature Article, 1957
- ^ American Artist, April 1957
- ^ Watson-Guptill, 1961
- ^ Van Norstrand Reinhold, Boston, 1966
- ^ Apt Books, Boston, 1989
- ^ Current members of Wellfleet Historical Commission: http://www.wellfleetma.org/Public_Documents/WellfleetMA_BComm/historical
