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Tom Prochaska

tom

The Balancing Act

BFA and Continuing Education Faculty

For over two decades, Tom Prochaska has nurtured Portland’s burgeoning community of printmakers. His style of “teaching with your mouth closed” induces exploration and revelation in his students, gaining him adoring followers who take his classes over and over. Add to this his role as co-founder of the local printing collectives Inkling Studio and Atelier Mars, and you get the feeling that this gentle but slyly funny PNCA Assistant Professor must be too busy for his own artwork.

In fact, Prochaska delicately maintains a balance between teaching and his artistic life, which is healthy and prolific. It spans painting, drawing, and more recently, glasswork — not to mention his own prints and his work as an edition printer (pulling prints of other artists’ plates). He’s represented by the Fröelick Gallery in Portland and Triangle Gallery in San Francisco, and works with glass at Portland’s Bullseye. His prints have been published in prestigious journals including Zyzzyva and Mississippi Mud. He must be doing something right; the local alternative paper Willamette Week named him one of the Top 25 people who have “made Portland Portland” in the last 25 years.

Prochaska grew up drawing and sketching in Illinois, and then earned a degree in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin. A full scholarship to the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn found him studying printmaking and painting. After a couple of years teaching at Pratt Graphics Center and at the University of Georgia, he followed his love for printmaking — and his Swiss girlfriend — to Europe. “That’s where I learned the most about printmaking, doing it every day and doing it in a real practical manner… in Switzerland, in a tiny town, St.Prix.”

When visa problems sent him back to the U.S., he taught at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, visiting family in Oregon during the summers. “And so I fell in love with Portland,” he sighs with a smile. “I went from being a Department Chairman to being in the Saturday Market.” His woodcuts of trout and salmon — “I also came here for the fishing,” he adds — were eventually licensed for use on T-shirts. Popular ones.

“That made me feel real happy because it was people’s art, art away from institutions,” Tom says. “In some ways, that was the most satisfying work I’ve ever done, because people wore them.”

Prochaska went on to teach at most of Portland’s colleges, eventually settling exclusively at PNCA. “PNCA is a sweet little community. It’s healthy, the students are happy, and we keep our vision of community,” he explains. “I’m allowed to create my own world. I teach this monotype class that has a real strong following, and that’s been my special project for sixteen years.”