A Guide to Traditional and Digital Techniques: Modern Printmaking

ForewordTo be an instructor at the Art Students League of New York is to hold a position of distinction among artists. The League’s faculty is an elite group of professional artists who are all recognized in their fields. Each instructor has a unique voice that puts a signature to his or her work and ultimately identifies its creator. The mastery and knowledge they convey to their students come from a lifetime of dedication and exploration of their chosen mediums. It is that dedication, as well as their ability to teach the techniques and means to understand the language of art, that inspires the thousands of students who study at the League each year and the literally hundreds of thousands who have trained here for nearly a century and a half. Sylvie Covey exemplifies those qualities of professionalism, mastery, and dedication. An émigrée from Paris, where she studied at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Ms. Covey came to the League to continue her studies, taking classes with master printmakers Michael Ponce de Leon and Seong Moy. She went on to study at Hunter College in New York, receiving an MFA in printmaking, drawing, and works on paper. Through this intensive study Ms. Covey became a master printmaker, not only mastering the traditional techniques of intaglio, lithography, and relief printmaking but also using that knowledge to establish her own voice within the contemporary oeuvre of digital printmaking and photo-etching as well as photolithography. Ms. Covey has proved to be as notable an instructor as she is an artist. Every year as part of the League’s annual student concourse, her class exhibitions reveal the highly polished professionalism of her students, who have availed themselves of their instructor’s rich and in-depth knowledge of the entire medium. Students at the Fashion Institute of Technology and the Art Center of Northern New Jersey continue to benefit from Ms. Covey’s expertise. As Executive Director of the Art Students League, I am very proud to call Sylvie Covey a League instructor. Along with the other members of the League’s faculty, she is helping to pave the way for today’s generation of artists to explore the potential of a traditional medium in ways that will allow them to speak eloquently and poetically in the future. Ms. Covey herself is a luminous example of that potential realized.