Photo by Lee Hawkins
Barbara Tisserat, a lithographer and longtime Virginia Commonwealth University professor much admired by her colleagues and students, died in her home state of Colorado on Monday after a more than two-year struggle with lung cancer. She was 66.
She joined VCU’s Department of Painting and Printmaking in 1978. When the school moved into its new Broad Street building, she organized and implemented the lithography studio.
I interviewed Tisserat in late 2005 when the Visual Arts Center of Richmond exhibited 75 prints and eight complete series ranging from 1985-2000, titled “Lessons: 30 Years of Printmaking.” The Reynolds Gallery simultaneously showed her then-recent work.
The show was an event for one substantial reason — Tisserat didn’t often present her work. Hauling around portfolios and banging on the doors of galleries didn’t interest her. “She was a private person,” says artist Heide Trepanier, who became acquainted with Tisserat during graduate school, “and I think that flowed into her art, too.”
The masterful artist preferred self-expression through her lithography rather than in talking about it for print, but I found her delightful and eloquent. She said then of VisArts’ galleries, “This is a tremendous opportunity to have my work in such an exquisite space,” and praised the curator, Ashley Kistler. “And it’s somewhat daunting. It feels a bit like the end of your life,” she chuckled. “That’s why we’re calling it a survey, instead of a retrospective.”
A recurring theme in Tisserat’s art is the slippery nature of perception. “One wants to define things,” she said, “but clarity proves elusive.” In earlier pieces, she used collage elements and diagrammatic forms. As her confidence and ability with the medium increased, she began showing the involvement of the maker. This was exemplified by a line drawing of her hand collaged within the pages of a dictionary.
“The hand is becoming more dominant in the work,” she said. “Maybe this is about my intent as an artist and my belief that lithography is a marvelous vehicle for drawing.”
In 2006, Tisserat received a nomination for Richmond magazine’s Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts. When I called her about the news, she politely declined to accept, citing her ambivalence and reluctance about public recognition.
Tisserat’s early 1990s series, “Accidents and Adventures,” is a group of self-portraits that formed a section of that 2005 VisArts exhibition. She chose to make, as she explained, “a diagrammatic self-portrait with pieces of black tape.” These pieces resemble cartoons, although, as they are individual prints, there are slight changes that alter the emotional content or each image. Paul Ryan wrote in Art Papers of the show that “the viewer quickly becomes aware that, for Tisserat, every image — perhaps every image of the world — is or can be a metaphor. When she combines images, context and perspective change, and meaning is renewed. A door opens to a new thought, and the known, tired world seems fresh.” Ryan observed that Tisserat “understands the naturalness and ubiquity of appropriation.” Paullette Roberts-Pullen wrote in Style Weekly that her use of “borrowed words, illustrations and diagrams from sources of supposed authority, such as dictionaries and how-to drawing books” dominated a number of the images.
Another consistent subject in Tisserat's body of work is her presentation of the Colorado landscape. She grew up there, often returned, and with some wistfulness recorded the alterations to once-familiar scenes.
“Tremendous changes are occurring there," she said, "as open land is turned into subdivisions. So there’s a certain amount of melancholy, which is part, I suppose, of having a certain perspective over time.”
Printmaking presents unique challenges: “Your drawing is always reversed,” Tisserat explained. “That’s one step away from where it was, so there's always an element of risk. Most characteristic of lithography, you make an error with the consistency of the ink or the number of rolls, it’s just very unforgiving. There’s an element of tension the process provides.”
Patty Parks, who knew Tisserat well, shared her thoughts via social media: "This is a sadder world for me, but how lucky I was to have Barbara as a good friend in a world of many wonderful acquaintances. A mutual friend of ours, Masumi [Seki], a printmaker from Tokyo, gave the perfect description of Barbara, 'I will always remember her as the calm and witty person that made us feel the world is what it is, but no matter, we will be fine in her company.' Barbara had that calming effect on everyone. That is what made her everyone's favorite professor."
