Bay Bluffs is an etching and color aquatint created in 2018 by Linda Lieberman. This impression was printed by the artist on ivory wove BFK paper and is pencil signed, titled and editioned SP a proof outside of the edition of twenty. The platemark measures 8-7/8 x 11-3/4 inches.
The subject is a view of the bluffs along the San Pablo Bay as seen from China Camp, just north of San Francisco, California. Summer grasses and coyote brush color the fore- and mid-grounds. Cypress trees billow out in the background. China Camp State Park is located in Marin County, California and surrounds a historic Chinese American shrimp fishing village and salt marsh. According to Friends of China Camp, the salt marshes provide protected habitat for wildlife, including the Salt Marsh harvest mouse and Ridgway’s Rail. The park’s salt marshes represent the most intact wetlands remaining in the San Francisco Bay estuary.
Linda Lieberman, painter and printmaker, was born in California in 1945 but was raised in Chicago, Illinois. By ten-years-of age, she was allowed to take the subway by herself so that she could attend Saturday art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lieberman recounted becoming friends with various masterpieces that she walked past on her route to classroom at the back of the Art Institute.
Lieberman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1967 after earning a B.S. in Art Education from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She traveled extensively, visiting legendary world sites and museums but earned her M.A. from San Francisco State University in 1987. Lieberman taught English as a second language at the College of Marin for thirty years.
Her art career began as a painter but Lieberman’s interest turned to printmaking after taking a workshop in 2007. She is equally facile in relief and etching. Her etchings combine various techniques including hard ground, soap ground, and line etching. She prints her matrixes in black and white or, if using color, she employs three plates. She has printed her plates at Crown Point Press, the Kala Art Institute, and the former City College of San Francisco classes at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Lieberman is a member of and exhibits with the California Society of Printmakers. Her etching and aquatint, China Camp, is illustrated on page 190 in California Society of Printmakers: One Hundred Years 1913-2013. Her work is represented in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
