Inking my block for a steamroller print; Lawrence, KS

Inking my block for a steamroller print; Lawrence, KS

 
Almost Right, linocut

Almost Right, linocut

 
Clyde, collagraph

Clyde, collagraph

About

I am an artist and printmaker from Lawrence, Kansas.  I am a retired high school English teacher, play fiddle in a Scandinavian folk dance band (https://ingevald.wordpress.com), garden and raise sheep at Fig Hill Farm in Jefferson County, am learning to weave baskets from natural materials, and make lots and lots of prints.  I am thrilled to be at a point in my life where I can do so many things I enjoy, and to be on this artistic journey.

MY HISTORY:

As a child, I was the one who was always drawing, the one whose notebooks were filled with people laughing and crying and dancing their way through life, the one whom people asked to make posters and illustrate school publications.  I took two art classes every semester in high school, and in college spent several years studying art and English before getting waylaid by other disciplines.  After graduating from Harvard University with a degree in philosophy, I had some adventures, bicycling across the country and then living in Idaho, before returning to Kansas, where I studied printmaking with John Talleur at the University of Kansas.

 Then life intervened, and art was relegated to the back burner.  I moved to Seattle because it sounded interesting, earned a master’s degree in creative writing at Temple University, got married and had children, got certified to teach English at the University of Minnesota, and moved back to Lawrence again, this time to raise my children and teach high school in my own wonderful community.  To fulfill my art urges, I filled a sketchbook every year, took periodic art classes at the Lawrence Arts Center, and saw as many exhibits at art museums across the country as I could.

 My mid-life crisis involved realizing that if making art was important to me, I really needed to be DOING it, so I took it off the back burner and started actively pursuing it.  For several years I seriously worked on and experimented with pen and ink drawings. I still loved prints best of all, but it had been several decades since I had done any printmaking myself.  After a trip to Mexico in 2013 and exposure to Mexican printmakers, I just HAD to start making prints again myself, and I embarked on a print-making journey that I am still super-excited about.

 

MY ARTISTIC INTERESTS:

As you can tell from the prints on this website, my prints are all of people.  I find human faces endlessly fascinating, and I am always looking at them—the way the light hits them, the way a nose or chin will jut out, the way crinkle lines appear when someone laughs.  Faces convey the story of being human, and the longer a person has been on this earth, the more that person’s face tells its story, which is why most of my prints are of older people, whose faces have had time to develop character.

 As well as the texture of the faces themselves, I am also interested in texture that comes from the medium used.  Different mediums prompt different kinds of mark-making, and I have been experimenting with the kinds of marks I can get from gouges and a block of linoleum, and the kinds of marks you get from gluing cut paper onto mat board and then printing it in an etching press.  In a world in which all things are interconnected, my figures are connected to the space around them through the energy of the texture.