Do you remember Hamilton Newell Printing?” asks Hanlyn Davies, referring to the longtime Amherst print shop. “I used to work in the back with the technicians and press operators, somewhat perversely and slowly making small, limited editions of offset lithographs using a commercial process that was designed for the high-speed mass production of images. Words like ‘mass production,’ ‘commercial,’ and ‘offset’ were anathema to the world of fine art printmaking back then.”

That was back in the seventies, when the now semi-retired UMass Amherst art professor was a member of Artists-Research-Technology, Inc., a group of artists who wanted to see how industrial offset printing technology could be used for fine-art printmaking. This fall, some of the lithographs from Davies’ “Hamilton Newell period” will be on view in Herter Gallery. What Davies calls a “mini-retrospective” will also include paintings, drawings, assemblages, and digital prints.

To create the digital prints for the show, Davies has recently been involved in “a process of reclamation and discovery,” working with photographer Stan Sherer, MFA ’06, who operates a fine-art digital printmaking studio in Northampton. “I had some images in the form of 35mm slides and negatives. I hadn’t thought much about them for a long time, but with the current digital technology and Stan’s expertise, I was able to revisit them and make some handsome Iris prints. In many ways, they relate directly to image concerns in my lithographs and paintings.” He gives an example: a photograph made of a glazed, framed lithograph in which a window is reflected, thus giving a glimpse of both the “collapsed space” of the immediate interior and the outdoors beyond. The effect is one of “continued layering, and of incidental or found images.”

Born in Wales, Davies joined the UMass Amherst art faculty in 1970, four years after getting his MFA from Yale. His work has been shown extensively, and he has been a visiting artist, critic, or guest lecturer at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland, and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, among other institutions. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Arts Foundation, and Yaddo, the venerable artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs. Art department chair from 1988 to 1998, Davies received a Distinguished Teaching Award from UMass Amherst in 2004.

Herter Gallery director Trevor Richardson says that Davies’ show will be “an important milestone for art on campus, and in the Pioneer Valley. Hanlyn’s presence here was so huge, his impact so profound, that I think the show will draw large numbers of people, including many alumni who studied with him.”

Of assembling work for the retrospective, Davies says, “It’s been useful. Certain connections come into focus, become more apparent. I see the overlapping concerns, the threads weaving through. It’s a comfort—comfort? Not the right word?—a reinforcement perhaps, a reminder of my view of the world, of my tendency to ruminate and rework. I’m seeing what has gone in and out of my thinking. I see habits—not all of them good—biases, the things that are there in the work. Art can’t help being very much who you are.”

Hanlyn Davies' show will be at Herter Gallery on campus Oct. 11 - Nov. 10.