Photograph by Newson Shewitz

 Phyllis Sloane
Birth Date: September 27, 1921
Death Date: May 26, 2009
Artist Gallery
Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1921, Phyllis Lester Sloane was a well respected printmaker. She discovered her interest in printmaking in fifth grade in Onaway School in Shaker Heights when she won a poster competition. She attended Carnegie Mellon University majoring in industrial design. She credits her career direction to her father, Nathan Lester, a machinery inventor who “taught her the joys of pursing a creative life”. He also taught her to trust the process of discovery. Sloane abandoned her first career when she started her family in 1949. But she never abandoned her art. She remained an active member of a life-drawing group that provided the subject matter for the next three decades of her life. Her career might have continued in that mode, had she not received an unusual gift of a broken-down Potter proof press – it was literally in pieces, that she rebuilt and taught herself to use. In his essay on the printmaking techniques of Phyllis Sloane, Robert Bell notes that she did not take up printmaking until she was in her 40s and then made up for lost time by creating over 300 original prints in the next forty years. Constantly creating and experimenting, her foundation training at Carnegie Mellon University and listening to her father’s advice propelled Sloane to solve her technical problems with printing in highly original ways. She happily admitted that as she was not a trained print maker and she didn’t know the rules so she didn’t see her works as failed when they went astray. Sloane earned a reputation for fiercely independent print making, mastering intaglio printing using hard and soft ground etching, aquatint, mezzotint and drypoint. She also fell in love the technique of silkscreen printing and quickly stamped her unique finesse on the medium. Sloane displayed a sense of playfulness in much of her work. She planted surprises in her still-life; for example, you’ll see a self-portrait doubling as a coaster on a table, an envelope addressed to herself, her own reflection in a glass. Often she placed her human subjects as objects on a canvas in partial view or off-center. She continued to work into her 80s.