Hat

Ed Paschke’s imagery in the 1970s featured performers (he was drawn especially to carnies, wrestlers, accordeonists, burlesque stars and actors), and others drawn from a variety of social subcultures, including the contemporary art scene in Chicago. (See Smart Museum 1978.170.) Hat is on the cusp of a stylistic shift that occurred in 1977 as Paschke began favoring images derived from electronic media images over the mass print media. (See 2004.36.) The exaggerated markers of identity, the photo-realistic rendering, and the symmetry of his earlier portraiture gave way to a new depersonalized figuration. Mannered facial characteristics underwent simplification into primary geometric color shapes and the relationship between figure and ground became more ambiguous and compositions more asymmetrical. His new emphasis on horizontal framing and composition recall film and television screens and medium close-up camera shots.
Although best remembered as a Chicago Imagist who made large psychedelically-colored oil paintings, Paschke learned printmaking techniques as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1960s. He was rarely involved in intaglio printmaking, preferring planographic processes. Two regular editions of this image were hand-printed—ten impressions, one of which was hand-colored, on two different kinds of paper—using violet-purple ink, which projects a cool high-key intensity.