An Escape

Doris Meyer Chatham

A surreal color serigraph (screen-print), done by Doris Meyer Chatham after studying printmaking in Paris in the 1950s. Meyer traveled to France to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, who had returned to Paris and re-opened Atelier 17 in 1950. She also studied independently with Atelier 17 printmaker Kaiko Moti, who had been pivotal in evolving the editioning of the simultaneous color printing (also called "viscosity printing") methods that were being experimented with at the Atelier. She continued to correspond with Hayter and Moti throughout the fifties and sixties.

After Doris and 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. Her style was distinctly Abstract at this time and she worked in lithography, two facts that went against the grain during such a male-dominated time in 20th century Modernism.

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. She experimented with the viscosity printing and gestural composition, developed at Atelier 17. Most of her color prints, such as An Escape, were done as experiments and were not printed in large editions, in this case only 22 impressions.