A painter and printmaker whose work moves between the West of Ireland and the Berkshire Hills — drypoint, monotype, intaglio; oil and watercolor; landscape rendered as memory and as warning.
View the work →For over twenty-five years I have been making prints and paintings that try to do justice to two specific places — the west of Ireland and the hill country of western Massachusetts. They are the landscapes that raised me and the landscapes I keep returning to. Light over water. The line of a hedgerow. Plant life at the edge of what we still have.
Before the visual arts I worked for two decades in the professional theatre — as a producer, stage manager, and scenery designer — and the staging instinct never quite left. A print, like a stage, is a constructed event: paper, plate, ink, pressure. Each pulled image is a single performance.
I trained at Smith College in studio art and biology, and the biology has resurfaced in the recent work. Birds we are losing. Plants under pressure. Landscape rendered honestly is, I think, a kind of attention. Attention is the beginning of care.
§ The Practice
Color and chance enter. Each impression is unique — drypoint scratched directly into plate, monotype ink rolled fresh for every pull. The work most absorbed in now.
Marks incised into copper or zinc, bitten by acid, inked, wiped, pulled under pressure. The oldest discipline in the studio — practiced for nearly two decades at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts.
Painted from the West of Ireland and the Berkshire mountains. The grey-green of Connemara, the ochre of October hills, the specific wet light of an Atlantic morning.
The subject matter often dictates the medium.— Olwen O'Herlihy Dowling, in conversation
Inquiries · Studio Visits · Commissions
Available for studio visits by appointment, gallery inquiries, and commission discussion.
Studio
North Chester
Massachusetts
Phone
805-455-3305Representation
Zea Mays Flat File