Tucked in the southwest corner of New Hampshire, near the Massachusetts and Vermont borders, is Wingate Farm. A typical New England home stands on the 50-acre farm, with several connecting additions reaching from the house to the barn.

On the outside of the barn, a small, unpretentious sign reads "Wingate Studio." You would never know from the slender, slightly balding man who runs the studio, as unpretentious as his sign, that some of the best intaglio prints in the United States, perhaps the world, are created in this barn. Or that some of the major contemporary artists from throughout the United States come to New Hampshire specifically to work with studio owner and master printer Peter Pettengill.

Walton Ford, for instance. A New York-born painter who now lives in Massachusetts and shows regularly in New York City at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, Ford sought Pettengill out five years ago when he decided to make prints.

"Peter came highly recommended," says Ford. "Judith Goldman, who used to be head curator of prints at the Whitney Museum (of American Art), is one of the foremost scholars and experts in printmaking. She knew of Peter."

Ford does enormous and detailed watercolor paintings of exotic birds and animals using a technique where he layers one color on top of another. He didn't think he would ever find anyone who could make his prints "so they would meet the kind of standards I set for my work. I felt completely terrified that this process wouldn't work. But I found the guy who could actually pull it off."

Ford and Pettengill are now working on the fifth of a series of six prints that will be sold by the Kasmin Gallery. Each print can take as long as a year from the original etching to the final printing. The two have become good friends as well as professional collaborators.

"Peter has had to be with me both a collaborator and a teacher," says Ford. "But the way he teaches me is so gentle that I don't notice he's teaching. He was very quiet when we first worked together. Now we make jokes, blast the music and have fun."

Pettengill, 47, does intaglio printmaking "the same way Rembrandt would have done it," he says. "The process hasn't changed since the 1500s."

It is complicated and labor intensive. An image is etched into a metal plate with acid. Then, to take a print, ink is pushed into the grooves and the surface of the plate is wiped clean. The plate is put onto a press bed with dampened paper on top, then run through the press under pressure, drawing the ink out of the grooves and onto the paper.

It sometimes takes several months just to make a plate that is acceptable to artist and printer. Once an original print is signed by the artist as OK to print, Pettengill will do the long job of actually making the limited number of prints – usually less than 50. A one-color print only goes through the press once. With prints that use several colors, like those of Ford, it may take six plates to form a complete print. Each plate must be printed separately, on top of the color preceding it and aligned perfectly with the image.

"You need a certain temperament to be a printer," says Pettengill. "Some of it is long, repetitive work alone. Some of it is intensely collaborative with the artist.

"You develop close relationships with the artists," he says. "You work closely together over long periods of time with some amount of stress. And it can be emotionally exhausting. You're always slightly out of control. Artists are used to doing this very solitary activity and here they have to give over some of their creative control to the printer."

Unlike many printmakers, Pettengill does not make his own art. It's helpful, he says, "not to have my ego struggling with the artist. But it would have been helpful to have done some art school. In 25 years, though, I've probably had a pretty thorough art education.

"I get a real reward out of making great art even though it's not my art," he adds.

Pettengill was not trained as an artist and only got into printmaking by happenstance. A recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst with a major in English, he set out for San Francisco in 1978. He thought he might pursue a degree in library science but, meanwhile, got a job in a book bindery. A friend's mother owned Crown Point Press and they needed a book binder, so Pettengill went to work there.

Unbeknownst to the young Pettengill, Crown Point was one of the premier etching houses in the U.S. When a printer left, Pettengill became an apprentice printer and went on, in his six years there, to work with some of the most well-known contemporary artists including Pat Steir, Sol LeWitt, Elaine deKooning and Richard Diebenkorn.

One of the more unusual projects Pettengill worked on at Crown Point was with the late John Cage, a very influential composer and conceptual artist who used what he called "indeterminancy" to create his compositions and prints, a reliance on chance rather than creative choice. They actually built a small fire on the press with shredded newspaper, lay dampened paper over it and ran the plate through the press. The resulting print was a random image of the partially burned newspaper content. Cage and Pettengill also did these so-called fire prints in the New Hampshire studio.

"I always expected John to do something a little bit odd," says Pettengill.

Pettengill's reputation followed him when he returned to New England in 1985 along with his wife, Deb Stewart-Pettengill, whom he had met in California. He thought he might teach printmaking but started getting calls from people who wanted prints.

"I had no press and no place," he says. He talked to his grandparents, who lived on Wingate Farm, and took over the barn for his studio. Growing up in Greenfield, Mass., Pettengill had spent much time on the farm as a boy. He rented a press and started by doing other people's plates. His first big client was The Limited Editions Club in New York City.

To this day, the floorboards in the studio are unfinished, the ceiling rafters are visible and the only heat is a wood stove in the front area that houses his computer and stereo. His press, built for him in Rhode Island, takes up about half of the back room. The walls of both rooms are lined with prints created by Pettengill and the many artists he works with.

One of the artists he's currently working with is Richard Ryan, a Northfield, Mass., painter. He says Pettengill is "very good at collaborating with artists. He understands the dynamic perfectly. It's a combination of sort of goading someone on and supporting what they want to do.

"He does everything extremely well," Ryan adds. "He's incredibly precise and very graceful and efficient. Part of etching is solving a lot of problems about how to transmit the image into this medium. Peter is very imaginative and helpful with that."

Artists comment on Pettengill's modesty as well as his craftsmanship.

"He's very self-deprecating," says Ford. "He doesn't see himself as an artist. But, after all these years, he's in a position to be a very good judge of what's good and what isn't. He doesn't hit you over the head with his opinion but you can trust it. He's one of the few people, besides my wife, that I believe."

Ford and Pettengill also did a printmaking workshop together at Brandeis University and Pettengill has taught at Smith College and the Hartford Art School in Connecticut.

Pettengill is not only a talented printmaker but also a talented musician. He sings, plays guitar and accordion, and writes songs. For 14 years, he was part of the Barnstormers, a group that played rock, country and zydeco – a Cajun and blues hybrid originating in southwest Louisiana – up and down the Pioneer Valley. The band was good enough to play at the Iron Horse Inn in Northampton and to open for the pioneering zydeco band, Boozoo Chavis, at the Pearl Street Club, also in Northampton..

For the last two years, Pettengill has played with a group called Planet Zydeco. Rose Sinclair of Greenfield, Mass., who plays accordion for the band, calls him "'Mr. Soul Lick. He knows his soul chops," she says. "He's one of the most talented and humble people I've ever known. He is a total pleasure to work with."

Pettengill is especially happy that both his children – James, 17, and Olivia, 15 – share his love of music. James plays guitar and drum; Olivia sings and plays piano and saxophone.

"When your children are teens," he says, "it's nice to find things that you can do together."

Pettengill had to give up the accordion a couple of years ago, and his career as a printer was threatened, when he tore two rotator cuff muscles in his right shoulder. After two surgeries, he is able to play guitar again but the accordion for only a couple of numbers. He's also hired a full-time assistant to help him with the labor-intensive job of printing.

"I'm learning to do things differently," he says. "I can still do the plate-making but hope to do less of the printing. I used to print Walton Ford's prints all by myself."

He is excited right now about a 19th Century French press he's hoping to purchase from Parisian Aldo Crommelynk, who Pettengill describes as "one of the best living printers in etching. He printed works by Picasso," he says. "That should be some pretty good energy."

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