Joan Dix Blair, Oakle Orange, aquatint etching, ed. 3, 2019, 45 x 30; Fiona Kennedy, Green and Yellow #8, acrylic collage on wood panel, 2022, 8x10

Artist Statement – Fiona Kennedy

Color Blocks

These pieces are a study of color response and shapes that create tension. Whether it is a bright hue against a lighter tone or the way a square can connect to another square that gives the pieces life. I made these for the viewer to feel tension in the shapes and possibly a harmony or aggression in the colors. By placing pieces together, wanting the pieces to show tension, often never really touching but still having an obvious relation to each other. The viewer might see people or just get a feeling of contact.

Fiona Kennedy + Joan Dix Blair

Exhibition Reception Date:

March 30, 2023

Exhibition Opening:

March 30, 2023

Exhibition End Date:

April 30, 2023

Exhibition Year:

2023

Artist Joan Dix Blair works in woodcut and etching, using traditional techniques. Her interest lies with mark-making that is in tune with her material – whether it be copper or wood. The artist’s vocabulary includes abstraction, simplification, and storytelling. Printmaking is her written language. Variant unique prints occur from the same plate.

The artist’s subject is the landscape. The series of etchings involving salamanders and their habitat occupied the artist for several years. The series includes long etchings presented as scrolls and a ceramic installation.

In 2018, Blair began a new series of etchings based on the typology of oak leaves, and one of these etchings has been included in the Southern Graphics Council’s Traveling Exhibit 2019-21. Blair’s drypoint renderings of oak leaves are presented as a boxed portfolio.

She titled a recent exhibit “Leaves” with a dual meaning: they are drypoint portraits of individual leaves and the prints are equally evidence of the the artist’s life. Discussing her landscape work, Blair quotes neurologist Oliver Sacks: “ferns are survivors.” Also Painter Luchita Huetado: “Trees are our closest relatives because they breathe out and we breathe in.”

The most important influence on her technical process was gained from the Master Printers at Kathan Brown’s Crown Point Press in San Francisco, CA.