Long Clawson is a color viscosity intaglio created in 1974 by American artist Roman Edward Oeschger. It is pencil signed, titled, dated and editioned 2/25. It was printed by the artist on a sheet of ivory wove BFK Rives paper and the platemark measures 15-1/8 x 19-15/16 inches.
Long Clawson is a small village in the county of Leicestershire, England. Situated in the Vale of Belvoir, the village is surrounded by farmland with rich soil ideal for pasture. Milk from local dairy farms is used for production of Stilton cheese. The Long Clawson Dairy is a producer of award-winning specialty cheeses including Blue Stilton and Rutland Red. Oeschger worked at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental printmaking studio Atelier 17 in Paris in the early 1950s. This print’s combination of vivid colors and layered shapes and lines illustrates the staying power of the Atelier’s early forays into the newly developed color viscosity intaglio process.
Ramon Edward Oeschger, printmaker and teacher, was born to Verne and Margaret Oeschger in San Luis Obispo, California on 9 October 1925. After serving in the Army as a navigator on a B17 bomber during World War II, he returned to school earning his B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Houston, Texas.
Relocating to San Francisco, Oeschger first attended San Francisco State University where he received his teaching credential and then he earned his M.A. from San Jose State University. Oeschger traveled to Paris in the 1950s to work at Stanley William Hayter’s experimental workshop, Atelier 17. After returning to the San Francisco Bay Area, Oeschger joined the staff of the San Jose City College. He taught there for thirty-one years and served as the art department chair and was a driving force behind the establishment of the City College Art Gallery.
Oeschger concentrated primarily on printmaking, specifically etching and engraving, as well as the collagraph process. He was awarded a purchase prize at the National Print Exhibition, Fourteenth Biennial at the Brooklyn Museum and another at the Northwest Printmakers Thirty-Fifth International Exposition at the Seattle Art Museum. Oeschger had a solo exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center in the fall of 1976 and his works were included in numerous exhibitions that toured more than twenty-eight countries.
The work of Ramon Edward Oeschger is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; and the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts.
Ramon Oeschger died from a heart attack after riding his bicycle in Saratoga, California on 6 April 1992.
