Provincetown Is Still White-Line Print Town

The white-line print seems to be alive and well in Provincetown. Last week, 11 people joined Bill Evaul at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum to learn the technique that’s so closely associated with this place it’s often called the Provincetown print.

The white-line print was introduced to Provincetown by Swedish-born artist B.J.O. Nordfeldt in the 1910s. Subsequently, a group of mostly women artists, the Provincetown Printers, popularized the technique. In 2023, an exhibition of their work at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston showed how these innovative artists captured Provincetown scenes and explored some of the era’s pressing artistic concerns such as Cubism.

Interest in the white-line print has risen and fallen like the tide since its introduction. Evaul, who is writing a book on its history, says interest in the form, especially among collectors, exploded after an exhibition at PAAM in 1983 that later traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Eventually, the market for these prints cooled a bit, but interest among artists steadily grew.

Evaul, who came to Provincetown as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in 1970, became fascinated with white-line prints at a time when interest in them was dormant. He began researching the prints and met some surviving members of the Provincetown Printers, including Ferol Sibley Warthen, who had learned the technique from Blanche Lazzell. He taught himself how to make a white-line print by reverse engineering the process. Since then, he has continued innovating with the form, notably in his large-scale prints, and has become a local champion of the technique along with Kathryn Lee Smith, the granddaughter of Warthen.

Read the full article in The Provincetown Independent