Ink&Image 2015 (PrintHouston 2015)

Archway Gallery presents Ink&Image 2015 in connection with PrintHouston 2015. The Group Show will be on view June 6 through July 8, 2015. The artists will be on hand to visit with guests during the exhibition opening reception on Saturday, June 6, 2015 from 5 – 8 p.m. at the gallery.

Sixteen of Archway’s member artists will participate in this group show celebrating the art of printmaking.

Featured artists are:  Barbara Able, Joel Anderson, Andre and Virginia Bally, Christie Coker, Kevin Cromwell, Mary Lee Gray, Paula J. Haymond, Tom Irven, Harold Joiner, Anita Nelson, donna e perkins, Shirl Riccetti, Peggy Sexton, Liz Conces Spencer, Cookie Wells, and Andrea Wilkinson.

An Akua Inks workshop sponsored by Speedball will take place on Saturday, June 20 from 10 a.m. until noon at the gallery. The workshop emphasis will be monoprints created with Akua Inks from Speedball’s professional line of printmaking products. The workshop will be led by Junanne Peck who has been recognized as a “Texas Original” artist by the Texas Commission on the Arts.

Barbara Able, known for her abstract and figurative paintings, was introduced to printmaking at Monothon: College of Santa Fe’s Annual Printmaking Workshop and Exhibition in New Mexico.

Encaustic artist Joel Anderson incorporates modern elements into an ancient art medium. He has produced many encaustic monoprints for this exhibit.

Andre & Virginia Bally, of Bally Studios, is a collaborative husband and wife team who have been working in clay for over 25 years. As ceramicists, they have developed new techniques and processes using screen printing techniques to enhance the surface of ceramic pieces.

Christie Coker typically works with acrylic paint on textured surfaces using sights and sounds from nature as her inspiration. She continues her exploration of texture while incorporating printmaking techniques into her artistic process.

Kevin Cromwell has been working as a printmaker for the last four years after starting with a “Steamroller Print” event in 2012. He works to make that process more visible in his latest works. Cromwell is currently exhibiting prints at the Universidad de Veracruzana in Mexico and has recently travelled to the University of Belgrade in Serbia to promote PrintMatters and the annual “Steamroller Print” festival.

Printmaker Mary Lee Gray approaches the making of art as a form of communication with its own special language. Gray carries on this conversation through her prints, primarily relief prints and monoprints together with collage, in which she shares her responses to the physical world as well as the spiritual, intellectual and emotional worlds that we inhabit and share.

Paula J. Haymond’s wood sculptural skills have now been turned to making prints using highly carved wood panels. Her prints resemble another aspect of ancient landscapes and unnamed creatures.

Thomas Irven’s sculptural forms and containers are usually tilted or asymmetrical. He uses woodworking tools to make modifications and special effects in the wood in order to create playful imagery inspired by nature and his imagination. Irven uses his woodworking skills and techniques to produce a woodblock or a woodcut from which he creates prints for this show.

Harold Joiner is a painter and printmaker who explores themes related to the natural or built environment. His work ranges from the purely abstract to the fully representational and is inspired by what he sees in the cities, parks and nature preserves, as well as the open countryside of central and south Texas.

After a thirty year hiatus from printmaking, Anita Nelson has adapted her painting sensibilities to dive back into prints. She maintains her sense of whimsy and animal subjects, a direction she has always loved. The beauty in doing art is the challenge of working with new media and discovering how one’s sense of aesthetics can be explored with various media.

Painter donna e perkins approaches monotype printmaking in an experimental and playful manner. She is interested in the play of light on metallic surfaces.

Shirl Riccetti, with her drawing background, has always enjoyed the physical activity and drama of transferring one image many ways. So much can be told in the placement, color intensity and design on the paper.

Peggy Sexton is a mixed-media fiber artist, concentrating in surface design. Her Art Cloth focuses on dimension and depth by applying screen and block printed designs on hand-dyed cloth. Sexton uses various printmaking techniques to express nature’s many layers of subtle, yet rich color and contradictions: Age and beauty, strong and fragile, danger and joy.

Liz Conces Spencer made many screen prints (serigraphs) back in the early 1980’s while teaching high school art. After morning classes, she had the time and space to pull small editions and let them dry on the student desks. Non-representational for the most part, these led in time to experiments with etchings, collagraphs, linocuts and woodcuts, the latter methods reflecting more organic resolutions. Printmaking has become an integral part of Spencer’s art vocabulary.

Cookie Wells paints expressive, colorful, bold, figurative watercolors. She loves painting on paper and because of that, all types of printmaking appeal to her. Wells likes the different effects achieved when one of her pieces is produced as a print. She feels that the artistic quality seen in printmaking is due to its long history.

Andrea Wilkinson shares her fascination with animals by sculpting them in clay to be cast as limited edition bronzes which are very textural in their representation of fur and feathers. In addition to her bronze sculptures, she uses a variety of mixed media to form one-of-a-kind birds which are then covered in multiple layers of papers which she has painted and printed to create the illusion of that texture.

Pictured above: Lemur with the Pencil Earring, By Anita Nelson.