The Multitalented Mr. Welden

During a recent conversation at his house and studio on seven wooded acres in Noyac, Dan Welden said, “ ‘Master printmaker’ is a touchy title for me,’ I know printmaking pretty well now, but every so often it will throw me for a bit of a loop. I like the idea that I don’t feel totally secure in any one thing. If somebody knows it all, then they might be considered a master. But that word ‘master’ prevents you from learning more, it puts a ceiling on things.” Little wonder, then, that the ceiling of his great room soars 30 feet.

Master or not, Mr. Welden, in addition to his own work, which has been included in hundreds of exhibitions worldwide, is the director of Hampton Editions Ltd. In that capacity he has collaborated with Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Jimmy Ernst, James Brooks, Dan Flavin, Esteban Vicente, William King, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfonso Ossorio, Jane Freilicher, Eric Fischl, and Jack Youngerman, to name just a few of the notable artists who have worked in his studio.

Mr. Welden started out doing stone lithography and became one of the few printers in the country who had the knowledge, equipment, and facility to practice it. “That provided me with a specialty. I knew that people would come here to do that. But I didn’t want to be swallowed up by that, so I promised to always do one of my own pieces in between anybody else’s.”

Mr. Welden also invented the Solarplate process, which he developed in 1970 when he was studying at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. “I went there as a painter,” he said. “I was snooping around and saw these people doing prints on stones. I had a master’s degree, but I had never seen a lithographic stone. So the teacher invited me in.”

The teacher was Kurt Lohwasser, who became Mr. Welden’s mentor — “not only in terms of how to do, but in terms of learning how to see and learning how to think.” It was Mr. Lohwasser who first put a Solarplate in his hands and suggested he try it. A Solarplate is a piece of steel with a light-sensitive polymer coating. One can draw on it, paint on it, or put a transparency on it. Wherever the sun hits the plate, it hardens. Unexposed portions of the plate can be dissolved by water.

“Instead of using acid, solvents, and grounds, you’re using sunlight and water. Which happen to be environmentally friendly and safe for artists. The timing was appropriate, and it became very successful.” Mr. Welden has for years conducted workshops around the world on using the process to make both intaglio and relief prints. “There is a tremendous range of possibilities: color, photography, collage effects.” He showed a print by an aboriginal artist he worked with in the Australian outback. He also worked with the Maori in New Zealand.

Because of time constraints, Mr. Welden is conducting fewer workshops, but he still travels widely. “I’ve decided to offer residencies in certain places, instead of teaching workshops. I just came back from Peru. The idea was to allow other artists to enjoy the experience and inspiration of Machu Picchu, and then work with that experience in mind. We’re doing it again next year in Cusco. I’m enjoying the residencies more than anything, because I get away from the telephone.” He also said that he finds inspiration for his own work when traveling, whether in Norway, northern Arizona, or New Zealand. “The landscape is really where it stems from.”

Mr. Welden was born in the Bronx. Because his parents died when he was young, he was raised by his grandparents in Babylon, which was, at that time, relatively rural. “My blind grandmother was actually one of the most supportive people about my artwork. Even though she couldn’t see it, I felt her love and her support just by her comments about how beautiful it must be.”

He attended Adelphi University and considered a career in architecture, but he felt there was too much math involved. Instead he received a degree in teaching and taught art in high schools for five years in Bayport and Lindenhurst. He was painting during those years, but he didn’t feel he had found his direction.

While he was still living on Long Island, his wife at that time suggested they move to Germany, “where they’ll teach you something, and you can also find your roots.” They went for a year but stayed for two. “The second year the work was starting to move, and I was becoming more and more successful selling prints. I thought, ‘I’m sitting high here, wait until I go back to the U.S., where people know me.’ And that was the big mistake. The bottom fell out. I went back to the security of my grandparents’ home.”

However, he managed to get a teaching position at Stony Brook University and expanded his horizons. “Since I was no longer a high school teacher, I had to become much more aware of what the art world was about. And then things started happening in a better way.” Among those things were two sons, Carl, now 42, a performance and voice artist, and Jeffrey, now 38, a chef.

Mr. Welden purchased the acreage in Noyac in 1980 and camped on the property for 14 years without running water while building the house. “I was trying to save money, and by doing that I was able to get this structure going. It took six years, and I built a lot of the house myself.” 

The multileveled structure, which he designed, has a vast main floor overlooked by a mezzanine where he paints and frames. The presses are on a lower level. The house is constructed entirely with joinery, its huge trusses secured by wooden dowels. The scale and materials suggest the great National Park lodges. Among the unusual touches is an old wooden trailer outside the house that contains a sauna.

  Mr. Welden is a modest man whose talents are visible everywhere, from the twisted branches of his second-floor balcony to the to the kitchen floor, whose tiles were hand-painted by more than 200 artists. “This is the most unusual house in the world,” he said, pointing out a doorknob made from one of his hipbones. 

Returning to the “master printmaker” idea, he admitted, “I don’t mind it if they use it on me, but they use it on everybody. I think that title has to be earned. I refused to use it until someone called me their master printer, and that was Bill de Kooning. So I said, ‘I guess I’m a master printer now.’ ”