Michael Halbert’s first-place artwork at the Members’ Showcase celebrates the American farmer and the beauty of a traditional printmaking medium.

Michael Halbert’s “Giant in His Field,” 20 x 28 scratchboard, won first prize at the Members’ Showcase. The added color was the result of a complex, multi-step screen printing process.

By Kara Dicker

Michael Halbert didn’t grow up on a farm, but he worked on one. His four summers putting up hay south of Potosi, Mo. during his college years left an indelible impression.

“I could see enough that these guys worked hard,” Halbert said of the farmers he met.

“Giant in His Field,” a pen and ink scratchboard illustration with added color, won first place at this year’s Members’ Showcase. A tribute to the American farmer, the piece depicts lush, prosperous fields beneath the enormous feet and grain-sifting hands of a faceless farmer. Another farmer, diminutively sized by comparison to the giant, tilts his head upward toward the tips of the giant’s boots.

Despite the imaginative l feel of the piece, Halbert said its message is literal: “The small farmer is a giant in his field of agriculture.” “They work a lot; everything is on their back; he’s all important to the farm.”

Halbert, who often works exclusively in black and white, added color to the piece through a multi-step process in which he created a blue line screen print on a separate scratchboard to guide his application of opaque color paint. Once completed, he made a second screen print by placing a film positive acetate sheet of the original pen an ink drawing atop the colored version. “The trick with color is not to not let the value exceed 20%, otherwise you lose your lines,” he said, adding that the black line work provides the shadowing. Line work is something Halbert has perfected over the years, having learned to let the thickness of the line control the intensity of darkness. As for the effect of adding color, Halbert said he likes the results. “The effect is different,” he said. “There’s more impact, it has more guts to it.”

Halbert is a founding member of Heartland Art Club and one of the few print artists featured at the gallery. His work on display is but a glimpse of his prolific career as a commercial illustrator and fine artist that began in the early 1970s when he was working at the Chrysler Assembly Plant in Fenton. “I started my first job with a small advertising agency,” he said. “I was very lucky to get that since I was self-taught.” Halbert credits a relative for encouraging his pursuit of art by giving him illustration assignments from which to build a portfolio. Halbert said that first job, which allowed him to walk away from the assembly line, was life changing. “I felt like I’d been set free.”

In the following decades, Halbert would work as a commercial illustrator for large-name clients such as Anheuser-Busch, publications including the St. Louis-based Sporting News and Missouri Life magazine, where he published illustrations of famous Missourians, and his portrait of Samuel Clemens graced its cover.

Scratchboard, Halbert explained, is an illustration board coated with white clay or chalk, or coated in India ink, where the artist works entirely by scratching out the black. It developed into a specialized kind of drawing that saw its rise in the early days of newspaper advertising. “Particularly in jewelry and appliances,” he said, “where you could make a diamond sparkle in newsprint.”

By the late nineties, digital technology rendered many illustration processes, including scratchboard, nearly obsolete. Though retired by this time, Halbert was not deterred. Instead, he has remained committed to traditional printmaking forms. This spring he coordinated a printmaking show at HAC, which highlighted the work of student artists at Meramec Community College, where Halbert attends classes.

Halbert said that the influence of today’s digital world, including AI, has made him a better artist. The absence of the human quality in digitized media has inspired him to reclaim it in his own work. For the last four years, Halbert has been drawing purely from human observation, even rejecting the use of his own photography for reference. The work he does now is more personal, he said, and with one main goal: “My point now is that whatever I do I want it to be more human and less about perfection,” he said.