Robert Hamilton Blackburn, (American, 1920 to 2003)
From 1957 to 1963, Blackburn served as the first master printer at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), West Islip. In most cases, he taught the artists, including Jim Dine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg, how to make lithographs, sharing his sensibility of the medium and his approach to the stone. He was stylisticly influenced by Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers, early practitioners at ULAE, further developing his own abstract imagery from this period into something looser and more fluid.
In 1963, he began to operate his own Manhattan workshop full time, providing an open graphics studio for artists of diverse social and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, styles, and levels of expertise. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world.
Information courtesy of Swann Galleries Inc., March 2005.