Clare Romano (1922-2017), earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in painting at Cooper Union School of Art in New York City from 1939-43, where she met her husband, and fellow print maker, John Ross. She credits peers in her painting, drawing, and two-dimensional design classes, Morris Kanter, Sidney Delevante, and Carol Harrison, with having the greatest influence on her path of artistic endeavors career. 

While serving in World War II, her husband, John Ross, was exposed to the Italian countryside and culture. In 1949, Ross was able to utilize his GI Bill to return with Romano in order for both artists to partake in studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Fontainebleau, France. Their influence and adoration of Italy continued later in their lives as they held printmaking workshops for the Pratt Institute in Venice summer program starting in 1988. Upon Ross and Romano's return to New York in 1950, Romano was invited to take lithography lessons at the Creative Lithography Workshop from Robert Blackburn, a high school friend of Ross. This medium was new to Romano as her educational sequence at Cooper Union did not include printmaking. Her talent within the medium was quickly notable as her first piece, Eglise de St. Martin (1950) won a purchase award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Romano continued her practice of printmaking throughout the next decade, teaching herself woodcut, etching, and collagraphy. She earned a Louis Comfort Tiffany grant for printmaking at the Instituto Statele d' Arte in Florence, Italy, the fall of 1958 through the summer of 1959.

Romano and Ross master their signature collagraph technique while visiting artists in Yugoslavia for the U.S. Information Agency in conjunction with "Graphic Arts USA," a traveling exhibition of American prints. There was no metal plates available for intaglio work in Eastern Europe. With this challenge, their solution was simultaneous intaglio and relief inking on a single cardboard matrix, their cardboard relief prints had been a continual exploration since the mid-1950s. Romano's process was one of inspired layering and transitions within the piece, provoked by the landscape around her. She neglected to begin works with templates and preconceived drawings. Shoreline, showcases the artist's accomplishment in variation of color and surface treatments from a single pass of a plate through a press. This work would have been printed in sequenced registration with multiple woodblocks and cardboard plates. Throughout Romano's printmaking processes, her proven desire to depict images of dimension and depth of color that preserves an abstracted simplicity creates intricate designed pieces of work.