Inkling Studio: Two Prints That Stayed With Me

Inkling Studio: Community and Printmaking in Portland, 1981–2009
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
Sunday, September 6, 2026 | 11:15 am.

While visiting the Portland Art Museum, I came across Inkling Studio: Community and Printmaking in Portland, 1981–2009, an exhibition exploring the artists who passed through the long-running Portland printmaking cooperative. Its history reached back to printmaker Jennifer Lanphier, who met John R. Clark while studying at Portland State University and helped establish and name the first iteration of Inkling Studio. Lanphier remembered it as a place of inspiration and described fellow printmaker Liza Jones as “the fairy godmother of printmaking in Portland.”

Lanphier’s own Summer Nude was among the works on view, part of the studio’s 1989 Wayzgoose portfolio. A number of works by women appeared throughout the exhibition, but two others in particular stayed with me.

The first was Eileen “ikie” Nolan Kressel’s 1997 etching Someday My Prints Will Come. The title immediately caught my attention, clearly — and playfully — transforming Snow White’s “Someday My Prince Will Come” into a printmaker’s joke. The image borrows from another familiar fairy tale, with a woman leaning toward a frog for the expected kiss, but the museum label revealed another layer: the woman is Kressel herself. The playful scene is also a self-portrait, rendered with the loose, immediate quality of a sketch capturing an idea as it forms.

That small piece of information changed the work for me. Kressel had placed herself inside the fairy tale, replacing the hoped-for prince with the hoped-for prints. The joke becomes one about her own life as an artist, while the etched lines give the scene a scratchy, eccentric quality far removed from a polished storybook illustration.

Nearby, Sheryl Funkhouser’s March Evening, created in 1989 for the Inkling Studio portfolio Wayzgoose, caught me for almost the opposite reason. Its color etching and chine collé create a strange, windswept landscape of branches, mist, and a figure sheltered beneath an umbrella.

The accompanying label made the image even more intriguing. Funkhouser admired Kitagawa Utamaro and other ukiyo-e artists and recalled that she “was thinking of Japanese ghosts when I was out walking in the rain.” She translated that rainy walk into the print, using spit biting printed in phthalo green to create the atmospheric mist and the tree in the upper-right corner.

Knowing that origin made the ghostly quality of March Evening feel less accidental. What began as an ordinary walk in the rain became a meeting point between weather, memory, Japanese printmaking influences, and Funkhouser’s own technique.

There were many other works to explore in Inkling Studio, including others by women artists, but these were the two that made me stop. One found humor in a fairy tale and the life of a printmaker; the other transformed a rainy evening into something spectral. Together, they offered two very different glimpses of the creativity that passed through Inkling Studio.