Patricia Curtan is an artist, designer, and printmaker. She has had a long association with Chez Panisse Restaurant in Berkeley, California as cook, and cookbook co-author, designer, and illustrator. She has designed and printed letterpress and linoleum block special occasion menus for Chez Panisse for several decades. The menus have been collected in a book to be published in 2011. In addition to cookbooks and specialty printing, Patricia has designed images and typography for logo identity, wine labels, product packaging, calendars, note cards, book covers, and broadsides.

Books that Patricia has designed, and in some cases, illustrated and co-authoured, include:

"Chez Panisse Pasta, Pizza, and Calzone"
"Chez Panisse Desserts"
"Fanny at Chez Panisse"
"Chez Panisse Cooking"
"Lulu's Provençal Table"
"Chez Panisse Vegetables"
"Chez Panisse Fruit"
"The Art of Simple Food"
"In the Green Kitchen"

Linoleum Block Prints

The process of making the prints is three part: drawing, carving and printing. It begins with a pencil drawing, which is transferred to linoleum blocks—a smooth layer of linoleum mounted on wood. The linoleum is carved with a knife and gouges to remove the negative space of the image and leave a raised relief surface. A separate block is cut for each color in the image. The blocks are then printed, one color at a time, on a one-hundred-year old 10 x 15 Chandler & Price letterpress. In some images, some of the blocks are printed multiple times to make layers of color. Some images have as many as twelve blocks and may pass through the press twenty times.

To view the progressive states of the Persimmon print from the Fruit Prints suite, roll over the sequence at right.

Two suites of limited-edition prints can be seen in the on-line galleries entitled Fruit Prints and Vegetable Prints. The prints were reproduced as illustrations in Chez Panisse Vegetables and Chez Panisse Fruit. If interested in more information or in purchasing a print, please send an email to: pcurtan [at] gmail [dot] com