Nature's Trap

Doris Meyer Chatham

In the late 1950s Doris Meyer travelled to France to study printmaking with Stanley William Hayter, who had returned to Paris and re-opened Atelier 17 in 1950. She continued to correspond with Hayter throughout the fifties and sixties.

After Doris and Heinrich Meyer were divorced in early 1955, she started driving to parts unknown and ended up in the Pacific Northwest. In Seattle she studied printmaking at the University of Washington with Glenn Alps who taught her lithography and collagraphy. After graduation she landed a job teaching art at Everett Junior College in Washington.

Doris moved to Marin County, California and began teaching printmaking at the College of Marin where she met and later married the painter Russell Chatham. She experimented with viscosity printing, developed at Atelier 17, and studied independently with Kaiko Moti. Most of her color lithographs, such as "Nature's Trap" were done as experiments and were not printed in large editions, in this case 27 impressions.