Night Dreams© 1998. Linda C Everson28″h x 20″w framed

A CLUSTER is a group of similar things or people positioned or occurring closely together. My solarplate print Night Dreams, is currently in an invitational show, CLUSTER, at IceCube Gallery in Denver.

My dreams tend to have clusters of images, ideas, fears, or emotions [...]]]>

Night Dreams
© 1998. Linda C Everson
28″h x 20″w framed

A CLUSTER is a group of similar things or people positioned or occurring closely together. My solarplate print Night Dreams, is currently in an invitational show, CLUSTER, at IceCube Gallery in Denver.

My dreams tend to have clusters of images, ideas, fears, or emotions that keep repeating themselves over and over. And I may have these dreams multiple times… sometimes months or years later. These are called “repetition dreams”. I quite often dream of flying, floating, or falling and I can’t ever stop that process.

In my print, Night Dreams, I included many small figures; some floating, some standing. The figures cluster, swirl, and lurk on top of and around the goddess faces. The multiple faces create a multi-tiered level of mystery. Sigmund Freud said that “dreams are the window to the sub-conscious”.

Bertil Vallien, who’s famous for his sandcasted glass sculptures, often included small floating figures in his vast boat and torso sculptures. His beautiful artwork influenced my own use of floating figures and also the use of vibrant color, transparency, and multiple layers of imagery.

A SOLARPLATE is a steel backed POLYMER PLATE that is light sensitive. Transparencies can be exposed unto the plates by sunlight or UV light boxes. In the Goddess series, I used Kodalith transparencies of photos of goddess faces which I spliced together after printing them in the darkroom. I drew the floating figures onto these transparencies with a opaque pen. After exposure, the solarplate was etched in water which dissolved the unexposed areas, creating textures in the plate.

To create the multiple “flat” background colors (greens, ochres, rust, tan) I made acetate cutouts (like a puzzle) which were rolled with the etching ink and then printed on paper on an etching press. Dark brown and ochre inks were then wiped onto the textured solarplate, and that was printed on top of the flat colors. This required tedious registration and many runs through the etching press to create all the layers of color.

Several years ago, I did a whole series of solarplate prints called the Goddess Series and another called the Torso Series, all based on Greek and Roman sculptures and reliefs which I photographed. In many of those prints, I included small floating figures that swirled through the larger figurative images and/or backgrounds. Some other Goddess and Torso prints that are not in the Exhibit and also are not on my website are depicted below. Please see my CONTACT PAGE is you’re interested in more information.

Mirror Image
© 2002. Linda C Everson
18″h x 11″w image size

Paper Doll Torsos
©2001. Linda C Everson
10″h x 25″w image size

Enchantment of the Trees and Forest
© 1997. Linda C Everson
11″h x 24″w image size

LAYERING was a common theme in many of my favorite prints in the show.

I loved [...]]]>

I just saw a wonderful exhibit – Women’s Work: Contemporary Women Printmakers from the collection of Jordan Schnitzer and his family foundation at IDEA Space, Colorado College in Colorado Springs. The exhibit included 56 /5000 prints from the collection.

LAYERING was a common theme in many of my favorite prints in the show.

I loved Helen Frankenthaller’s huge abstract woodcut, Madame Butterfly (2000), with 46 woodblocks used to create the artwork. Although she’s more known for her color field paintings, I love Frankenthaller’s woodcuts even more. Similar to her fluid transparent use of paint with canvas showing through; in this woodcut, transparent inks reveal the surface texture of the woodblocks underneath. She used her ‘guzzying’ technique, which involved using dental tools and sandpaper to raise the texture of the wood for better printing. Lovely layering!

In Sherrie Wolf’s Artemisia Suite prints, still life fruit images were layered on top of old copies of Artemisia Gentileschi’s 17th century paintings of women. Her oppositional use of old and new artwork, and the swirling figures versus the static fruit was intriguing. Sherrie Wolf commented on her artwork,

“Art stretches us by being several things at once. It can be a ripe fruit ready to fall off the canvas onto the floor, but also, when viewed up close a collection of brushstrokes on a flat surface.”

As a photographer/printmaker, I liked Hung Liu’s lithographs that were based on old Chinese photos. “My prints are metaphors for memory and history.” she said. The photos became more subjective and reinterpreted with her painterly style of Abstract Expressionism. Also, the layering of landscape imagery such as wildflowers and birds in Hung Liu’s added another dimension of symbolism of Chinese women. Ironically, in China everything had to be “official“, and hence Liu “broke the rules” in her Unofficial Portrait series. Her past history of the Cultural Revolution, her art training in dogmatic China, and her present status as an American art professor, show the dual nature of her images and style. The layering of multiple themes of womenhood, culture, and aesthetics are implicit in her “portraits”. “Printmaking is about layers”, Hung Liu explains on page 5 of Painterly Proofs: Prints by Hung Liu.

It was great to see an exhibit of some of our best contemporary women printmakers! What I thoroughly enjoyed was that the artists used many conventional printing methods in a contemporary manner, and there weren’t any monotypes in the show.

But what of the differing methods? The perception that scientists spend [...]]]>

But what of the differing methods? The perception that scientists spend their lives seeking definitive, quantitative answers, while artists seem content to raise broad questions and let audiences or viewers draw their own conclusions?

Jim White uses a surprisingly artistic metaphor to explain the relationship. “One way to look at it is like this: Just as a sculptor chips away what is not needed in a block of stone to reveal the art within, a scientist chips away the unproductive theories to expose the truth within.”

EcoArts Connections in Boulder, CO has scientists and artists working together with innovative technology to raise more environmental awareness. EcoArts is one of the organizers of “Bolero Colorado” where there are several art /science events in September in Colorado. There will be a violinist performing in front of NASA images, dances, multimedia events, wind farms visits, and so on.

The Denver Botanic Gardens will host a multimedia event on Thursday, September 17 at 7 pm. There is also an art show by Bonny Lhotka called Alchemy (through September 20) at the Botanic Gardens. I was at the opening, and got to speak with her firsthand about her innovative use of digital photography and laser technology to create her images of nature. Extremely intriguing technique and wonderful artwork!

As you know, nature is an also important element in my own artwork. In 2005, I collaborated with a scientist for a WCA show called Women in Science? Science in Art? at the CU Gallery in Boulder. I typically don’t work with math, but since Martin Walter was a mathematician, we decided to work with fractals in nature. Since aspen trees and the magnification of the tree bark was my current theme, that became the imagery.

Sierpinski’s Triangle: In the Aspen Forest.

 © 2005 Linda C. Everson, All Rights Reserved.

Yolande Moreau is remarkably skilled at playing [...]]]>

One of my favorite past times is watching art movies and foreign films. Recently I saw a wonderful movie, Seraphine, at the local art movie theatre, Chez Artiste. This movie has won 7 French Academy Awards (Cesars) including Best Picture and Best Actress. The movie received great reviews.

Yolande Moreau is remarkably skilled at playing the real-life Seraphine, a lowly housekeeper in the daytime and an avid artist at night. Her guardian angel inspired her to become a self-taught painter (naive art), and she made her own “secret” colors from various natural ingredients in the French Senlis countryside. Her various rituals in life: housecleaning, shuffling through the woods in search of paint ingredients, singing to the Virgin Mary while painting by candlelight late at night; all are craftly portrayed in this poignant film.

In 1912, Seraphine was discovered by Wilhelm Uhde, an art critic, dealer, and early collector of such famous artists as Picasso and Rousseau. The story is of their relationship as artist and her sometimes benefactor, both with trials and tribulations, both with an excessive love for their art. It is a touching story of an artist’s perseverance through the harshest of circumstances.

I thought the movie Seraphine was beautifully photographed. In keeping with the theme, the director used “no warm colors” except for the ‘colorful paintings’ by Seraphine; no special effects, just great camera angles. It was a sobering , yet extremely inspiring film. How can anyone truely creative have any excuses for being non-productive after seeing the intensity of this artist who had many problems.

Below are a few quotes from an interview of the director, Martin Provost.

There are often people who are not erudite, who were not born in favorable circumstances, or close to culture, but who carry within themselves this incredible creative capacity, irrepressible and disturbing at times. These artists are like deep-sea fishermen, far from artistic evolutions and turmoil, with no teachers or disciples, and they don’t always get the recognition they deserve.

He also emphasized that rituals were a way of disciplining one’s life.