Weitchpec is a color mezzotint with roulette and drypoint created in 2006 by American artist Byron McClintock. It is pencil signed Byron, dated, and editioned 1/14. Besides the edition of fourteen, there were also two proofs. Weitchpec was printed by the artist on wove BFK Rives heavyweight paper and the platemark measures 12-7/8 x 15 inches.
Weitchpec is an unincorporated community within the Yurok reservation in Humboldt County, thirty-five miles northeast of the city of Eureka in Northern California. It is located at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers. This mezzotint is McClintock’s visceral response to the landscape and his colors, Naphthol red, raw umber, and black, combine with his lines to give the image power, drama, and depth.
Byron McClintock was born in Klamath Falls, Oregon in 1930. In 1946, he joined the Merchant Marines, sailing throughout the Pacific. He moved to San Francisco in 1949 and enrolled in the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA) where he studied under Edward Corbett, Richard Diebenkorn, and James Budd Dixon. During those years he served as class monitor for Dixon’s printmaking class and printed lithographs for many of the students. In the early 1950s, McClintock tended bar at Vesuvio Café, a saloon that was an important hangout for the Beat artists, and he shared a studio in the Mission District with Ernest Briggs.
McClintock served in the U.S. Army between 1953 and 1955. After his discharge, he returned to San Francisco where he co-owned Acme Photoengraving, a photoengraving business specializing in commercial advertising work, until 1980. During the 1960s McClintock exhibited his paintings at the John Boles Gallery in San Francisco and, in the late 1970s, he purchased a large studio on Howard Street and bought a press to return to printmaking.
New York Abstract Expressionist print collector, Charles Dean, rediscovered Byron McClintock in the early 1990s. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased a few of his prints and included them in a Recent Acquisitions exhibition in 2004. At Dean's urging, McClintock traveled to New York from the Pacific Northwest to see his work hanging in the Whitney. McClintock's work is also in the collections of the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
