Beyond The Categories:
A Paint Print Dialogue
| Peggy Badenhausen Joel Janowitz Catherine Kernan Peik Larson Michael Mazur Heddi Siebel. |
Featuring the work of
curated by Ilana Manolson
 Heddi Siebel |  Peggy Badenhausen |
 Catherine Kernan |  Joel Janowitz |
 Peik Larsen |  Michael Mazur |
The Concord Art Association presents Beyond The Categories: A Paint/Print Dialogue, a show of six established artists who generate imagery from the discourse between two inherently different media–painting and printmaking. The show has been curated by Ilana Manolson, an established painter and print-maker.
On Friday, November 11 at 7 pm, the Concord Art Association at will host a panel discussion Beyond the Categories with Michael Mazur, Peggy Badenhausen, Joel Janowitz, Peik Larson, and Heddi Siebel. Moderator by exhibit curator Ilana Manolson, the panel will explore the interactions of the paint-print media with a focus on both content and process. The panelists will use their own works in the surrounding gallery as illustration to the discussion. Following the panel, there will be an opportunity to talk with the artists.
It is said that when you speak a foreign language you become a different person. And perhaps, it is the transitional moment of “becoming that other person” a back and forth from one language to another– which can most deeply inform us about ourselves. Here, six artists– Michael Mazur, Catherine Kernan, Peik Larsen, Heddi Siebel, Joel Janowitz, and Peggy Badenhausen–shift effortlessly between the different vocabularies and syntax of two languages–painting and printmaking. Painting is a medium known for its directness, its intuitiveness, and its limitless versatility in surface, color and scale. Printing, on the other hand, is indirect; the image must be processed before it can be printed, and then, when transferred to paper, the image is reversed. Yet, more often than not, it is the very constraint of printmaking that fathers its unexpected results. Fluent in the languages of both painting and printmaking, the artists of Beyond The Categories cross reference the two media distinctively and personally. They bring the quickness of the painter’s brush to the copper etching plate, or make unique prints by combining paint with the reversed images, the negative spaces, and the separate layers so familiar to the print process.
Michael Mazur, an artist known internationally for his figurative work and evocative landscapes, shows new work from his Diary. These bright, totemic images of life are veritable paint/prints that combine spray paint and stencil to achieve unsettling and novel results.
Catherine Kernan defies printmaking’s constraints of scale by constructing sixteen 12” squares into a dramatic, super-size grid. A landscape moment of water and vines takes on consequence as she delicately layers printed forms with translucent paint in her piece Lyrical Linear #3. “Whether these pieces appear to be one or the other [painting or prints] should be irrelevant to their impact.”, says Kernan.
Peik Larsen picks up on printmaking’s characteristic layering of transparent color, and uses it in both print and painting to animate graceful forms.
In Pool Figure, a vertical landscape etching, Heddi Siebel takes what she learns from the fresh stroke of the paintbrush into the acid bath of the etching; and then celebrates the medium by impressing the paper with printmaking’s saturated inky blacks.
Like a larger than life window into a supernatural world of transfigured common objects, artist Joel Janowitz combines etching with multiple layers of soft paint to make Hanging Plants, a one of a kind monoprint.
“Monoprint allows an idea to evolve over the course of many prints, echoes of each other.” says Peggy Badenhausen. Printmaking has led her to a series of paintings using calligraphic notations of dance in rhythmic iterations. Yet, she adds, “painting has made me interested in unique prints, not editions.”
Whether or not their dialogue focuses on process or concept, these experienced printmaker/painters use the media to startle themselves into an unfamiliar world, and to surprise the viewer with new language that is greater than the sum of its parts.