72. DENNIS Y. ICHIYAMA
“I’m just picking letters and colors and playing with them,” says Dennis Ichiyama, professor of visual communications design at Purdue University, of his experiments with pieces of broken wood type and lead rules. To create his prints, Ichiyama starts with 25 sheets of paper and then layers colors on top. “When I get tired, when I don’t know what else to do, I stop,” he says. “And by the time I’m done, I usually end up with about 15 that I think are good.”

Ichiyama has the original 13 x 19-inch prints scanned, reduced, and color copied. He then hand-trims and glues them into preprinted booklets that he uses for self-promotion. The original prints are sold or given away. The prints are one more expression of Ichiyama’s work documenting and experimenting with pieces he finds at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wis. “When the volunteers at the museum ask me what I’m doing, I ask them what they see,” Ichiyama explains. “They scratch their heads and say, ‘I see letters,’ or ‘I see colors,’ and I tell them, ‘Yes, that’s basically all there is.’” Laurel Saville