Annalee Poe's Wildly Inventive Work Would Freak An Older Generation Of Printmakers. By Margaret Regan A LONG TIME ago there was a tyrannical printmaking professor at the well-known Tyler School of Art in suburban Philadelphia. A rigid man with an imperious Eastern European accent, Professor R. trained more than one Tucson artist. He ran his studio by the rules. He would have called it the tradition. First of all, you had to hold the print itself in a kind of reverence. The etching or woodblock print or lithograph was a work of high art, crafted only of the finest materials. Paper, ink, maybe a little watercolor for the woodblock, that was it. Carved wooden blocks and metal etching plates were tools, nothing more, and certainly had no place in a finished work. Though he prized abstraction, Professor R. emphasized the kind of fine draftsmanship the permissible materials allowed: the fluid line allowed by the chemical grounds on etching plates, the eccentric line generated by the grain of the wood on the block. The completed works were relatively small, their dimensions limited by the small size of the studio printing press or the lithograph stones or the woodblocks. They were like what Jane Austen called her novels, "small ivories," finding their beauty in an economy of materials and a compressed poetry of images. Twenty years later, Professor R. is dead, and so, more or less, are his printmaking rules. In the current show at Dinnerware, Annalee Poe, a young printmaker spawned by the UA master's program three years ago, provides almost a textbook case of just how dead they are. (Poe shares the exhibition with Dawn Chandler of New Mexico, who's crafted tiny collages of painted paper and cloth). Poe's teachers at the UA, where such printmakers as Sheila Pitt routinely print on pillowcases and mattresses, likely would approve of her show of "alternative" prints and drawings. But Professor R. would have been scandalized at Poe's enthusiastic mixing of her media, with such unlikely materials as cement and wire getting equal billing with etchings on paper. He would have disapproved her non-hierarchical embrace of Xerox photocopies and a commercially printed tablecloth, both of which Poe has incorporated along with prints of her own making into finished pieces. He would have taken a dim view of her using her carved woodblock as part of a finished work. Ditto for her painting watercolors and acrylics into her woodblock prints and etchings, and for cutting out parts of her etchings and dangling them by wire in the air. In fact, all six of Poe's pieces, five of them on the wall and one on the floor, challenge the old printmaking rules. Like the contemporary painters who mix their media by gluing found objects to their canvases and the sculptors who layer paint onto their sleek metals, Poe sees no reason to limit her materials, preferring to go beyond Professor R.'s old inks and papers. She wants to go big too, and it's the mixing of her media that lets her do that. An untitled ink-and-etching drawing of a forest is so huge that it spreads over eight large connected sheets of printing paper, making the whole thing somewhere around 16 feet wide by 12 feet high. The four pieces in the December Diary series are big too, about 4 feet wide by 8 feet high. They're essentially collages, glued to a base of what appear to be painted boards. Cut-out etchings and woodblock prints of such things as tree trunks, a female nude, a birdbath are glued onto the surface, and little cut-out etchings of bats dangle three-dimensionally on wires. Poe's untitled sculptural floor piece travels even further from the old flat surface required by traditional etchings. In this piece, the etchings play only a minor role: Dozens of etched prints of flowers--opened and closed irises--sit on wires planted in rough cement. The flowers "grow" in a large spiral on the floor, eventually leading to a Xeroxed picture of a turreted castle glued to one side of a painted white box. What is Poe getting at, apart from her exuberant defiance of the old conventions? There are elusive references to nature, to dreams, to longing in all the works. Poe herself says some of her work is inspired by the pictures in books from her childhood. The large untitled forest drawing is a simple homage to the Eastern woodlands (Poe went to college in Maine) and trees recur in the December Diary series. Here, bare of leaves, they're signs of bleakness, meshing with the melancholy female figure rendered in woodblock. The castle from the floor piece reappears in one of the wall pieces, dream-like, above the woman's head. Number III in the series, the one with the flowered tablecloth background, is a florid departure from the other spare works. It's loaded with imagery, including some surprising classical motifs: A minotaur reposes on Greek columns and the grasping hand of an apparent Icarus tumbles out of sight. Poe is working with some interesting ideas, but so far they don't come together with the aesthetic power of, say, Chandler's elegant collages on the opposite wall. There's something choppy about the compositions in the December Diary series; and the black-and-white prints glued onto color have a bit of an unintended cartoonish quality. And that curmudgeon Professor R., while applauding some virtuoso cross-hatching on the bark, would have reprimanded Poe for some inaccuracies in the ink drawing of the forest. "If you're going to stoop so low as to do a recognizable image in art," this lover of pure abstraction might have said, "then for heaven's sake get your shadows right." He was rigid, all right, that Professor R., and it's no wonder contemporary printmakers are eager to shake off the rules he represented. But for all the joyful abandon printmakers like Poe find in their brave new materials, they've also lost a thing or two. There is still something to be said for the professor's defense of high craft and for his veneration of the pure and the fine in art. Works by Annalee Poe and Dawn Chandler continue through Saturday, June 15, at Dinnerware Artists' Cooperative Gallery, 135 E. Congress St. Gallery Hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 7 p.m. Thursdays. For more information call 792-4503. For another view of contemporary printmaking, check out Mimesis 2, Central Arts Collective's show of work by numerous UA printmakers. The exhibit continues through June 15 at 188 E. Broadway. Hours are noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, plus 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, and 7 to 10 p.m. Downtown Saturday Nights. For information call 623-5883.

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