Title: The Pied Piper

 

Media: Mixed technique intaglio, with etching, engraving, aquatint, scraping and burnishing; signed and numbered in pencil.

 

Date: 1972

 

Edition #: 93 / 100

 

Size: Image approx. 12 x 18"; sheet size approx. 14.75 x 20.5"

 

Condition: Excellent

Notes: Pretty self-explanatory.

 

 

David Fraiser Dreisbach (1922-2019), print-maker and educator, was born in Wausau, Wisconsin and moved to Rockford, Illinois early in his childhood. As a seven-year-old, he would often accompany his mother, also a talented artist, to meetings of the Rockford Art Association, where he would practice still life and figure drawing. During the 1930s, David and his two brothers loved to sing, and would perform as a trio on the radio in Rockford. He met the love of his life, and future wife of 72 years, Doris Elaine Magnuson, while in junior high school. Both graduated from Rockford High School in 1940.

Driesbach set off to the University of Illinois in 1940, but his schooling was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. He would go on to enlist in the Marine Corps First Division, and was sent to the South Pacific, where he served from 1942-1945. Due to his keen sense of direction and artistic abilities, he was tapped as a scout, who would seek out enemy encampments, and return to headquarters to draw the war map for the officers in charge. He returned to the United States on Thanksgiving Day, 1945, having lost one brother in the Navy. He recalled every soldier on board ship weeping when they crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge, seeing their home country again at long last.

Shortly after the war, He continued his education under the G.I. Bill, attending Beloit College from 1946 to 1947, the University of Wisconsin summer term of 1946, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1947 to 1948, and the University of Iowa between the years 1948 and 1951, receiving his BFA and MFA from the inventive and influential professor Maurcio Lasansky.

Driesbach’s teaching experience includes Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas; Iowa State Teachers College, Cedar Falls, Iowa 1953-1954; Millikin University, Decatur, Illinois 1954-1959; Ohio University, Athens, Ohio 1959-1964; and finally at Northern Illinois University Dekalb, IL. He was that university’s first Presidential Research Professor and retired from teaching in 1992.

On a sabbatical in 1969 he traveled to Paris to work in the famous Aterier 17 with Stanley William Hayter where he learned the technique of color viscosity printmaking.

David Driesbach was an extremely prolific artist, creating hundreds, if not thousands of artworks. Many are held at an archive at the Northern Illinois University Art Museum. He was an innovator in the development of new printmaking techniques and was featured in hundreds of national and international exhibitions. In his later years, he traveled the country giving workshops at colleges and universities.

Driesbach received the prestigious Printmaker Emeritus Award from the Southern Graphics Council in 2012. His work is represented in the collections of the Seattle Art Museum, Dayton Art Institute, Columbus Gallery of Fine Art and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

For his entire life, artistic expression poured forth from David Driesbach; his prints synthesize curiosity, wit, exploration, storytelling, satire, whimsy and complexity.