Pat Snyder prepares the Coos Art Museum’s new etching press for a test run. Contributed Photo

More than 40 years after earning his advanced degree in printmaking, Pat Snyder still works by trial and error. In a first-floor studio of the Coos Art Museum, with a behemoth etching press dominating the room’s center, he leans over a 4-inch strip of film to count off the minutes and seconds.

He’s thinking that three minutes under the light is just about right.

Snyder is refining his skills and experimenting with techniques that he’ll put into play this winter, when CAM offers a new series of printmaking classes. Intaglio, lithographs, monotypes and serigraphs are well represented in the museum’s permanent collection, giving Snyder’s students immediate and up close access to the highest quality fine art prints. The new classes, however, will focus on an innovative, “non-toxic” photopolymer printmaking process.

During the 17th century, when Rembrandt’s patience, experimental nature and creativity brought printmaking to an artistic pinnacle, the process could sometimes be hazardous. Acids could burn, and fume inhalation could prove toxic. Potentially dangerous materials will be banished from the CAM classes, as students learn to work with light, sensitive films that are etched, simply and safely, with water.

Snyder, a former art instructor at Marshfield High School and currently an active volunteer at CAM, was initially drawn to printmaking while studying at Northern Illinois University. “I liked that I could duplicate my work,” he notes, “and I like the resistance of the medium.” Resistance is everywhere in the printing process — from the turning of the crank to move the press across the prepared plate or film, through the removal, or “pulling,” of the final, inked paper.

CAM’s new press was donated to the museum by Pat and Gail Snyder, following their discovery of the venerable machine at the home of a Bandon artist. When printmaker Pat Pike moved north from Thousand Oaks in 1998, she brought the press. She had purchased it from a Los Angeles artist four years before; that artist had acquired it from a school.

Until health issues claimed her energies and attention, Pike had been an active print maker. The press, she claims, served her well.

“I had a wonderful time with it, and I even won some prizes. That it’s going to be used for instruction, that thrills me,” says Pike.

The one thousand pound green etching press, possibly dating from the 1940s, had been sitting in Pike’s Bandon studio. She was concerned that the massive machine would fall victim to disuse and rust. Now, the press and a collection of her papers and inks have been passed along to the Snyders, who in turn have brought the press to the public.

“We want to grow the printmaking process,” states Snyder.

He admits that the photopolymer process is new, and he has purchased a book, “The Contemporary Printmaker.” An initial class offering, Non-Toxic Intaglio Printmaking, was a runaway success last month with six students — the maximum class size. Today, Snyder is working up a roster of print classes slated for early 2009: Embossing in Paper; Monotype; and Engraving/Drypoint with Embossing.

“The inking is an art,” says Snyder. “The wiping is an art.”

And the future of fine art printmaking at CAM is a done deal.

Teri Albert reviews art and artists for The World. She can be reached at malbert3@verizon.net.