Shaking Chris Pritchett’s hand is like gripping five crayons. His digits are perpetually splotched with dried colors.
It’s a hygienic state that some might call unclean, yet it reflects his very contentment.
Pritchett, adjunct professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, is proficient in an artistic technique called “screen printing.” On a finely-threaded mesh screen, inks are forced through a stencil design onto materials such as paper or canvas.
There are many resulting products from simple business cards to complex posters.
Pritchett first explored screen printing as an undergraduate Virginia Tech architecture student. His devotion to the medium has ultimately propelled him to faculty positions at Tech, and he’s currently pursuing a role at two different institutions in Stockholm, Sweden.
Pritchett’s initial move to Blacksburg was a reactive decision.
In 2000, he followed his then-girlfriend, now current wife, Elizabeth Gilbert from Charlottesville to Tech. He was interested in sports medicine, but no such program yet existed. He had no backup.
“It was kind of like throwing a dart at a dartboard,” he said.
He enjoyed drawing, though, and chose an appropriate discipline, however misinformed of its benefits.
“At the time I thought architects made a lot of money,” he said with a laugh.
In his fourth year of the undergraduate architecture program, Pritchett was in a design studio class that frequently traveled to Chicago. A supplementary course called “What Makes a Town” prompted students to study something unique to three specific Chicago neighborhoods.
The various styles of graffiti Pritchett found intrigued him.
“I needed to document that somehow,” he said, “and I didn’t think it would be the proper way to display it if I just printed it off from a plotter.”
A fellow student taught Pritchett how to screen print the Chicago wall art. After the graffiti, Pritchett completed another project which involved the homeless.
“You can’t walk a block in Chicago without somebody asking you for money,” he said. “I try to be empathetic, but at the same time I’m not into giving money away.”
He made a habit of carrying around a sketchbook, sharing his spare change only after beggars penned a drawing. He screen printed the illustrations and displayed them in the Cowgill Hall lobby and other local venues such as the Jacksonville Center for the Arts in Floyd.
“They hit a chord that I hadn’t anticipated,” Pritchett said. “People really enjoyed them.”
During his final fifth year, Pritchett curbed his production of traditional hand drawings.
“I screen printed half of my (undergraduate) thesis,” he said.
Having developed his skills, Pritchett offered to host a summer screen printing workshop at Tech in 2005 after finishing his bachelor’s degree. Observing its success, School of Architecture and Design Director Scott Poole and Associate Professor of architecture Kathryn Albright created a screen printing course for credit with Pritchett at the helm.
There are other courses in the school also driven by faculty interest, Poole said, including pottery and fabrics.
“It doesn’t take a lot of resources on our part to support someone doing that,” Poole said. “It takes very little, actually, and it’s very rewarding to see how they flourish in those roles.”
Pritchett balanced the screen printing course with another job in Radford. He worked alongside two Tech alumni designing and building both small residential projects and home additions.
Pritchett took a hiatus from work after he decided to return to school for a graduate degree. In 2007, he worked with Poole and other architecture faculty to set up a two-year Master of Science program with a screen printing focus.
“Most of my (master’s) thesis was analog printing with digital technologies,” Pritchett said, “which is, you know, me making things with my hands but also using the most modern technologies.”
While screen printing dates back thousands of years, its contemporary design stencils are often crafted using Adobe software such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
At the tail-end of his graduate studies, Pritchett got a taste of professorship. A faculty member with traveling obligations asked Pritchett to temporarily instruct his students.
School of Architecture and Design Director Scott Poole approached Pritchett again this past spring and asked him to teach an architecture design studio the following semester.
“Probably 25 percent of our faculty are adjuncts,” Poole said. “And when we find someone who’s a really good influence and might be interested in teaching ... we try to provide them with an opportunity.”
Pritchett accepted the invitation, although he admitted to being intimidated.
“I didn’t want to take on a job where I was going to do people harm,” he said.
Making a bad screen print of a poster is disappointing, Pritchett explained, but that graphic failure doesn’t affect another’s personal wellbeing.
“I figured if I don’t tell these guys the right thing or if I don’t push these guys hard enough, I’m doing them harm,” he said. “That’s a year out of their life — nine months out of their life — that I haven’t helped them.”
But he said he thinks he has helped them, and one of his second-year architecture students, Bob Vance, agrees.
Vance said since Pritchett is graphically based, the students have been challenged to communicate their design projects in engaging ways.
“Architecture is great,” Vance said, “but if you can’t, you know, convey your thoughts well on a board in a presentation, then it doesn’t really matter because no one understands what you’re doing.”
Pritchett currently teaches screen printing, and Vance is one of nearly 30 students. But next year Pritchett will step down to once more follow his wife — this time to Sweden. She is a molecular nutritionist, and the University of Uppsala located in Southern Sweden offered her a position.
Pritchett is exploring two opportunities in nearby Stockholm.
One is a teaching position at the Royal Institute of Technology. He’s been in contact with a Tech graduate who now heads the institute’s School of Architecture.
And specifically regarding screen printing, Pritchett hopes to garner attention from Iaspis, a residency exchange program that strives to create a global artistic dialogue. He’d have a small studio space and slim funds to execute his screen printing ideas.
“For international people, it’s invitation only,” Pritchett said. “So there’s no way that I’ll be invited because they don’t know who I am. So I am in the process now of putting together packages where I’m going to send them stuff every week for the next six months just to let them know that I’m interested.”
One of the first packages includes portraits, predominantly of students. Pritchett asked interested participants to take headshots in a photo booth. From that reel of pictures, he’s used the screen printing process to transform them into saintly figures.
And those images likely won’t be the final tokens of his tenure at Tech. He and his wife plan to keep their house and return stateside after one year.
“I hope to continue a relationship with Tech,” Pritchett said. “I’d like to pick up where I left off.”