Mike Jackson, Owner
When the aquatint Into the Hills was awarded first prize in 1948 at the Sixth Annual National Exhibitions of Prints at the Library of Congress, Charles M. Capps became recognized as one of the foremost printmakers in the United States. Two years later his acclaim was extended internationally when his print Mission at Trampas received the Reid Award from the Society of Canadian Printers, Etchers, and Engravers. However, these awards were not the first for Capps. An early woodblock print, Low Water, was included in an exhibition of the American Federation of Arts in 1931 and selected for an international exhibition of prints. In 1935 the Kansas City Art Institute awarded him the silver medal for graphic arts at the Midwestern Artists Exhibition.
Charles M. Capps was born on September 14, 1898, and raised in Jacksonville, Illinois. After graduation from Illinois College in 1920, he attended the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts for two years and spent an additional year studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1923 he worked for a brief period at the Western Lithographic Company in Wichita, Kansas, before relocating to Springfield, Illinois, and subsequently to San Francisco where he worked as a commercial artist. In 1925 he accepted another position at the Western Lithographic Company and returned to Wichita. After six years he moved to the McCormick-Armstrong Company, another major printing firm in Wichita, where he remained until his retirement in 1965.
When Capps (or “Chili” as he was known to his friends) settled in Wichita he found a fortuitous convergence of talented individuals who shared a common interest in printmaking, private and commercial presses which were printing the works of established artists, and a growing national market for these lower cost original works of art. By December of 1930 this convergence resulting in the formation of the Prairie Print Makers, with Capps among the ten charter members.
The Wichita artists drew upon influences extending well beyond Kansas, most notably the nationally recognized artists residing in New Mexico. The close proximity of the art colonies in Taos and Santa Fe allowed for an active interchange of ideas and techniques between the New Mexico artists and those in Wichita. Also, many New Mexico artists engaged the Western Lithographic Company to print their work.
Despite the strength of his reputation, Capps was not a prolific printmaker. Over a period of fifty years, from 1929 to 1978, he produced a total of about ninety images. There was an extended hiatus in his printmaking during the seven years preceding his retirement in 1965. After retirement, however, he returned to his studio and began to create new work and to complete editions of his earlier prints. Several of the pieces he produced in this period are considered to be among his best. Three of his commissioned gift prints were produced following his retirement.
Capps is most noted for his etchings and aquatints, which compose eighty percent of his work – about fifty percent aquatints and thirty percent etchings. His initial ventures into printmaking utilized woodcut and linoleum block techniques. Using these, he produced a collection of bookplates and at least five woodcuts. However, this phase of his work lasted only a few years. Capps created a small number of lithographs during his career, all demonstrating a high level of skill and ability with this medium.
By the early 1930x Capps’s interests had shifted toward the etching and aquatint techniques, which allowed him to produce a combination of fine line and gradations of shade and light. Doel Reed, who was teaching at Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State University) in Stillwater, Oklahoma, only about 100 miles south of Wichita, had established himself as a premier aquatint artist. Working with Reed, Capps developed his skills in this difficult and labor-intensive process and for the following forty-five years pulled prints from a press he had made with Reed.
The commissioned gift prints which Capps produced were widely distributed and are some of his finest work. The first in this series was Society Night-Beecher Hall completed in 1934 for his alma mater, Illinois College. With the end of World War II, the Boeing Company commissioned him to produce a gift print showing the B-29 bomber (known popularly as the “Superfortress”) that had been built in Wichita. The result was Mission Accomplished, a patriotic image of the moon-cast shadow of the plane flying over the snowfields of rural Kansas, a moving tribute to both those who built the plane and those who flew the plane. His final two gift prints were Idyll of New Mexico, a second gift print for the Prairie Print Makers, and Mountain Mission, a second gift print for the Friends of Art, Kansas State University.
Capps’s work focused on four regions – Kansas, New Mexico, Mexico, and Hawaii. Recognized as a “Regionalist,” one of his favorite Kansas subjects was the mammoth grain elevators which are ubiquitous to the Kansas landscape. He presented this subject in one of his earliest etchings, Castles in Kansas, in and early lithograph, Beside the Mills, and in several aquatints. In all of these images he presents the mundane grain elevators as monumental creations rising from the prairie landscape. Another frequent subject in Kansas was the farm country. However, he transforms the ordinary houses, barns, and outbuildings into strong, noble structures as a statement about the nobility of the rural population during the depression years. The majority of his etchings were of Kansas subjects.
In the mid-1930s Capps visited Villa de Santiago, a community about twenty miles south of Monterrey, Mexico. After his return to Wichita, he produced a series of lithographs and aquatints based on his sketches and photographs. These include his initial gift print for the Prairie Print Makers, Mexican Barber Shop. The aquatint The Pool–Monterrey showing a pool with three nude female bathers is unusual for Capps, since he rarely included human figures in his prints. It is, however, reminiscent of Does Reed’s aquatints which frequently feature females.As a commercial venture, Capps produced a dozen small aquatints of Hawaiian subjects based on photographs that had been sent to him from the Islands. These prints, marketed in Hawaii, were made both before and after World War II in editions of 150 or more. Each of these small aquatints (usually about 3-1/2 x 4 inches) demonstrated the same skill and effort he devoted to his other prints.
For much of his life as an artist, Capps drew inspiration from the mountains and adobe structures of northern New Mexico. He sent many summer months sketching and photographing the landscape and architecture of the area. When he returned to Wichita, he transformed these sketches and photographs into powerful images of an ancient landscape which had not yet been impacted by the industrialization of the rest of the nation. From simple homes to magnificent churches his architectural features seem to grow out of the earth and become one with the environment, and his aquatints capture this vision. The largest number of his aquatints are of northern New Mexican subjects from communities such as Questa, Peñasco, Las Trampas, and Taos.
In 1967 Capps is listed as having produced two prints – Church of the Twelve Apostles and Mountain Mission. The Catalog Raisonné2 lists an edition of only four prints for the Church of the Twelve Apostles executed in an unknown medium while Mountain Mission had an edition of 200 and was a commissioned gift print for the Friends of Art, Kansas State University. It appears that the two prints are actually the same image – the beautiful San Jose Church at Las Trampas, New Mexico, which was completed about 1760. However, there is a tradition in the village of Las Trampas that the Church was built some seventy years earlier, a time when no Europeans were actually resident in the area, and dedicated to the Twelve Apostles. Where did Capps get the title? Perhaps when he was sketching the Las Trampas Church one of the local residents told him the story.
Another perplexing problem concerns the identification of an unsigned and untitled aquatint. Although identified by an art dealer as the Church of the Twelve Apostles, it is an image of the Chapel of Santo Nino in Chimayo, New Mexico. However, the image is reversed from real life. This may be the rarest of Capps’s aquatints. It is not included in the Catalog Raisonné, and is likely the only remaining print of this subject. The community of printmakers in Wichita area often shared prints with their fellow printmakers. Since the image was reversed, Capps may have limited the production of the print and distributed it to only a few friends without intending to market it.
When “Chili” Capps passed away on July 17, 1981, the art world lost a major printmaker. In his own quiet way he had produced a significant body of work while employed full time as a production manager for the McCormick-Armstrong firm in Wichita. He had provided for his family, yet achieved international recognition as an artist. The evidence of his formidable skill as a draftsman, his technical proficiency as a printmaker, and his fine aesthetic sense remains readily apparent in his prints to this day.
Biography from: http://www.casewardprintmaker.com/C.A._Seward_1884-1939/Capps_2.html
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