Gary Shaffer Influenced by Hans Hoffman's Push-Pull theory of artistic composition, Shaffer developed a unique aesthetic language to express his connection to the landscape with abstracted elements from the mid-western plains of his childhood and travels to Greece. He painted with highly saturated colors intermittently from 1957 to 1993, exploring the plasticity and reflective quality of oil paint on large-scale canvases. Influenced by abstract expressionism, Shaffer excelled in the printmaking medium, using bold shapes, texture and dense colors to define his personal style. He started out in stone lithography after college in 1958 at Bob Blackburn's Printmaking Workshop in New York where he paid a fee of $15 per month for shared studio use. In 1967, he jumped into a new, experimental form of printmaking known as the collagraph, and for 20 years he literally stretched printmaking paper to its limits. He crafted multiple plates out of masonite, carved gesso, and applied metal shapes to produce rich highly textured embossments. Among his West Coast contemporaries exploring the collagraph were N'aima Leveton, Eleanor Rappe, Karl Kasten, John Ilhe, Stephanie Weber, just to name a few.