Airborne

Doris Meyer Chatham

An Abstract Expressionist lithograph, done by Doris Meyer Chatham while studying art in Paris in the late 1950s. Doris Meyer traveled to France to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, who had returned to Paris and re-opened Atelier 17 in 1950. She continued to correspond with Hayter throughout the fifties and sixties.

After Doris Clark and the controversial, German-born professor Heinrich Meyer were divorced in early 1955, she started driving to parts unknown and ended up in the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle, she studied printmaking at the University of Washington with Glen Alps who taught her lithography and collagraphy. After graduation, she landed a job teaching art at Everett Junior College in Washington.

Doris moved to Marin County, California, and began teaching printmaking at the College of Marin where she met and later married the painter Russell Chatham (1939-2019). She experimented with viscosity printing, developed at Atelier 17, and studied independently with Kaiko Moti. Most of her color lithographs, such as "Airborne" were done as experiments and were not printed in large editions, in this case, 22 impressions.