Janet Doub Erickson

=Block Printer, Author, and Graphic Artist=

techniques and had several children, subsequently returning to a professorship in the United States [From 1955-1959 at SUNY Buffalo New York] .

Profiled and photographed by Gjon Mili in the now defunct newsweekly "Life" in 1951 [Life Magazine, July 9th, 1951, Gjon Mili] , she was nicknamed “Jumping Janet” for her practice of jumping on her linoleum and wood blocks to make the ink stick deeper into the textiles she was printing. She was also the subject of profiles in the art magazines "Craft Horizons [Craft Horizons, Feature Article, 1957] " and "American Artist [American Artist, April 1957] ", and won a first prize in textile design from the American Craftsmen's Council in 1954. In 1961 Erickson wrote Blockprinting on Textiles [Watson-Guptill, 1961] (which went into two editions and a number of printings). A 1966 book she co-wrote with Adelaide Sproul, Printmaking Without A Press [ Van Norstrand Reinhold, Boston, 1966] popularized both traditional and her own more innovative linoleum and wood-cut printing techniques at a time when block printing was on the verge of extinction in the United States. Fortuitously timed with a renaissance in interest in traditional crafts during the sixties, the book further spurred interest in Janet Doub Erickson's art. In 1989 she published her early line drawings in the retrospective book Drawings of Old Boston Houses [ Abt Books, Boston, 1989] . Her prints, drawings, and paintings have been purchased for the permanent collections of the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Saudi Arabian Royal Commission for Jubail and Yanbu. (She lived in the Middle East for a number of years.) She is also represented in private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.

In the nineteen sixties she moved to California, where she lived for more than a decade prior to moving to Croatia (then-Yugoslavia), then Venice, Italy, and finally to the Middle East, before returning to California. In 2001 moved to her long-time summer residence on Cape Cod, where she currently resides, and did historical research on New England vernacular housing. Now retired as a printmaker, in recent years she has written for a variety of textile and architectural magazines, and is currently a member of the Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Historical Commission [Current members of Wellfleet Historical Commission: http://www.wellfleetma.org/Public_Documents/WellfleetMA_BComm/historical] .

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