ARTIST STATEMENT

As a fine art printmaker, my focus is works on paper. I make contemporary fine art prints, drawings, and mixed-media collages. My images begin as ideas. Exploring questions about and connections to nature, human relationships, epiphanic life experiences, and our humanity, I work with abstracted images and identifiable images used in an abstract, metaphorical manner to convey my ideas into visual works on paper. My drawings, paintings, photographs, hand-made and found objects serve as source material as they find their way into my visual images of hand-pulled hand-drawn lithography and photo-lithography, intaglio, and serigraphy prints, as well as mixed-media collages and drawings. For me, contemporary printmaking sets up a dialogue between concept and markmaking-drawing my idea is the initial step and the constant in my process; the way I draw the image to activate the matrix involves unlimited choices and energizes the hand-pulled printed image. Layering and juxtaposition of hand-made source material combine with my digital and photographic processes to convey my idea in the image. Printmaking is catalyst to markmaking; the medium allows me to combine traditional lithography, intaglio, and serigraphy techniques with ever-changing digital technologies. The interplay of evolving digital/photographic technologies and techniques with age-old processes allows me to incorporate printing on and with alternative materials and tools. I view contemporary printmaking and my process as a synthesis of traditional techniques coupled with the innovations occurring when I entered the dialogue and my openness to experimenting with and embracing these continuing innovations.