Jeff Palmer is a self-taught artist who works with block printing. Based in Rhode Island, Palmer had to adapt when COVID-19 began sweeping the country, calling it the “pandemic pivot” because “our lives were put on hold.”
But relying on pop culture and throwing in a dose of chaos, Palmer continued to create artwork and discovered block printing on Instagram.
Here is a conversation. The full interview can be found here.
“I started to see some things on Instagram about printmaking, and I started to get curious about it because when you make an original piece of artwork and sell that, it’s gone and that’s a good thing,” Jeff Palmer says. “But I got curious about printmaking because you can create a negative image, a plate that you can ink and make copies of, and you can not just sell one or 10, but as many as people want to buy.”
Block printing is something ingrained in everyone, Palmer says. Call it a natural fingerprint.
Creativity spills all over the place
“I always tell people we’re born with our own block print and it’s our fingerprint,” he says. “So basically that’s what it is. And there’s ink that lands on a surface and you press it. That’s what makes those lines. If we didn’t have a fingerprint, it would just be all black, right?
“I’ve always been kind of into chaos, which kind of spirals into taking things apart, putting them back together again. And I think maybe in my head, there’s a lot of ideas that need to get out. It’s messy. I guess maybe that’s more of it. It’s like creativity to me, spills all over the place.”
Palmer says he has been influenced by singers, actors and artists. He also enjoys creating portraits, “capturing sort of the essence of a face.”
“Sometimes I’ll incorporate little snippets of lyrics, their songs, or just something like Prince, ‘Let’s go Crazy,’” he says.
Bringing artwork to the people
Palmer said his experience as a graphic designer impacted his view of Rhode Island, and he just started “to think of it in terms of catchy phrases.”
“What I do is I try to find those folks that have really touched me and influenced me, the people, the musicians, the politicians, the big thinkers of a moment in time, a point in history that are influencing us, that are affecting us,” he says. “But what I love most, I think, is really bringing the artwork to the people, to the folk.
“Folk art. It’s always a trip. You never know who you’re going to connect with. You never know who you’re going to meet.”
