Impressed: An Exhibit of Printmaking

With guest artists from Havana, Cuba and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, the exhibit from the Westbeth Graphics Studio printmakers, features work that signifies the importance of culture and art over politics.

Participants:

Christina Maile, Francia Tobacman Smith, Claudia Vargas, Claire Rosenfeld, Parviz Mohassel, William Kennon, Gerard Marcus, Gerardo Ruiz, Ketty Diaz, Cari Rosmarin, Jean Wolff, Jackie Lipton, Rifka Milder, Sheila Schwid.

Bios

Ketty Diaz
Born in Havana,Cuba in 1984.Graduated from San Alejandro national academy of fine arts in 2005.Photography workshop of the Elementary School of visual arts.Specialist at Havana’s graphic experimental workshop,2005-2008.Currently Professor of graphic arts at San Alejandro academy of fine arts.She has participated in several personal and collective exhibitions,such as:11y12 Bienal de la Havana ,At the see of Saiz brothers associations,.San Alejandro school,23y12 gallery, Centro of development of Visual Arts,Luz y oficio gallery Havana international festival of poetry,Havana’s Experimental graphics workshop,International movie’s festival of Havana.Her work has been exhibited in Netzahualcoyo Mexico,Cuernavaca,Estado de Morelos,Centro de arte Latinoamericano.First Edition exhibition about domestic violence ,Barcelona,España.

Gerald Marcus
Gerald Marcus has shown his work in many exhibitions in New York, nationally and internationally including The National Academy of Design; The Hollar Society, Prague; The International Print Center, New York; The Susan Teller Gallery, New York; Iowa State University; The Lancaster Museum, Lancaster, PA; The City University of New York; The Trenton City Museum; The Municipal Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ; and Smith College. Marcus is a former president of the Society of American Graphic Artists. He isrepresented by the Prince Street Gallery in New York, and the Concept Gallery in Pittsburgh.

Cari Rosmarin
My paintings, prints and drawings have been featured in solo  exhibitions in New York, including Westbeth Gallery & Project Room, The One Twenty Eight Gallery, The June Kelly Gallery, and  The Bronx Museum of the Arts.   Group exhibitions in NYC include The Drawing Center, White Columns, Westbeth gallery, 128 Rivington Gallery. I have participated in exhibitions throughout the United States including the Albright-Knox gallery in Buffalo,  the Provincetown Museum in Provincetown, MA,  the Nassau County Museum and the Islip Museum in Long Island, NY,  the Virginia Miller Gallery in Coral Gables, FL, the Waterworks Visual Art Center in Salisbury, NC, the Woodstock Art Association in Woodstock, NY, etc. In addition, my work is in numerous private and corporate collections, including those of Pfizer Chemical, Reader’s Digest Corp., A.T.&T., Prudential Life Insurance Company, CBS Art Collections (featured on “The Good Wife”) and the New York City Health & Hospitals Corp. I received a B.F.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo and an M.F.A. from Hunter College in New York City.

Jean Wolf
Jean Wolff studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and at the University of Michigan. She attended Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She’s had group and solo exhibits in numerous galleries in New York City and internationally.

Christina Maile
Christina Maile is a printmaker, painter, and landscape architect. Formerly a playwright she –co-founded the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective, one of the first feminist theater groups in the USA, and later attended Dan Rice’s master classes in painting. Her landscape architectural work has appeared in Garden Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. In 2013 she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Studio Grant for painting and printmaking. Her work is represented in many private collections, and has been included in the Feminist Artists Database at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY. www.christinamaile.com.

PARVIZ MOHASSEL Artist Statement:
Parviz Mohassel
For Printing Exhibition in Westbeth Galley October 8 to 29 2016

Hand-Pressed Wood Grain Project —-
Penobscot Prints, Maine

The coastline of Maine spans about 2 degrees of latitude and 4 degrees of longitude along the Atlantic Ocean. The irregular coast of Maine extends for 3478 miles of tidally influenced shoreline along the Gulf of Maine as a semi-enclosed sea with Penobscot Bay as its largest feature along the coast. Underwater canyons and shoals outline the relief of the bedrock structure offshore. Some 3500 islands lie along the Maine coast with offshore of about 2800 square miles of submerged lands. The islands are simply the higher elevations of larger bedrocks some extended 200-300 feet below the ocean surface. Accumulation of glacial and the other marine mud sediments generally cover seafloor and these reliefs. According to the Coastal Marine Environments maps, 41% of the intertidal zone is composed of mudflats.

THE PROCESS

In 2010, when I salvaged leftover wooden pine boards from a building construction site on the coast of Penobscot Bay I did not expect to use them as my plates in 2016 prints. These 10 prints subsequently entitled Penobscot Print series were made only using exposed wood textures and grains from the building site.
The tidally influenced edges of Maine coastline with the near shore bedrock reliefs, mudflats and islands are fascinating to watch. Deer Isle causeway crossing on the eastern side of Penobscot Bay is one of these locations.

Everyday, sea floor and mudflats manifest themselves seemingly in different shapes, i.e., with their partially submerged bedrocks and dendritic branchlike drainage swells only visible in the low tide. For me the visible dendritic drainage swells sometimes resemble painter Willem de Konning branchlike line paintings of 80’s. These streams and channels are visible almost entirely at the low tide and at times they are low enough that seafloor and rocks are accessible by foot.

The occasional scenes are fascinating to watch as if the salty seawater is pumped out of the sea floor allowing it to recede to the bottom of the causeway providing an underwater view of complex spatial patterns of bedrock, sand, and gravel. As if surfaces are opening to see the depth of the sea, a different seafloor, consequently marine habitats changing quickly over a short distance, a quality full with textures, surface and depth.

The natural coastlines movement of emerging and submerging, the visible seafloor mudflats and rock relieves have constituted high level of a fluid spatial and temporal geometry in my memory. These manifolds of perceptual generalities invariably had influenced my connection to the sea, the Penobscot Bay and estuaries with irregular shapes that connected to Deer Isle causeway.

In addition to the variations and diversity of seabed floors, displacement of marine life in the tidal zones and erosion of the seashores there are many salt marches, which are important in the intertidal environment. Here I do not deal with these issues for my art project. Just briefly, 14% of the intertidal zone of coastal environment is composed of salt marshes. They are mostly found behind the coastal beaches, dunes and along the estuaries. The low marshes are flooded daily by the tidal waves while the high marshes are only fully flooded monthly during more extreme tidal waves, mostly they support linear channels and sinuous secondary drainages along their spans.

My fascination with a visual and tactile life of seafloor reliefs and the transformation of seabed led me to search for viable methods, and material techniques of representation. The possible translation of all these coastal conditions was inundating and was beyond my simple idea of a printmaking. So, I decided the deal with the possibility of employing a reduction method or an act of epoche and represent these formations as momentarily pause in their constant daily expansions and contractions, or one might say, as a still life, a spatial plenum of lines and forms.

WOOD BLOCKS
At a building construction site on the bank of Deer Isle waterfront, on the coast of Penobscot Bay, wood end pieces were cutoff from the long boards and discarded. Some were left outside exposed to the weather and within the high tide seawater and some were tossed into the dumpster on site. I found out from the workers that these cutoff boards presented various defects and they were not suitable for construction. The defects were varied from one piece of wood to another. The so called wood defects included checks, compression fractures across the grain, fractured fibers, honeycombs, shakes, splits, wane or lack of wood on the edge, and large growth knots.
Although they were called defective and weak, I found them a source of inspiration. They uphold common characteristics of beauty and uniqueness and some kind of the waterfront stains. I was permitted later to visit the site and take some of these boards. So, I salvaged a dozen or so leftover boards and kept them with me. Six year latter they became wood blocks for my Penobscot Bay prints.
Each individual board revealed a new surface with different grain patterns and with its own variation in shape, cut ends and irregular edge formation. The actual Penobscot Bay also formed jagged edge shorefronts and the seafloor mud beds. The boards, which were left outside exposed to the weather could perceptually reveal some sort of similarities to these bedrock reliefs next to it.

HAND PRESSED AND STAMPED TECHNIQUE
Except for a selective mild sanding and cleaning some of the salvaged wood boards, they became blocks for my printmaking. My intention was not to alter, disregard or smooth out the rough edges, surfaces and jagged grain cross sections instead intuitively I used them as given. As such, they were ideal for various printing technique as I attentively used them. These salvaged boards were ideal for wood impression pull-off of Japanese printmaking and for Persian woodblock stamping technique. The handblock for stamping got its name from the act of stamping the paper by hand using these woodblocks. The original Persian technique was called Qalamkary because artisans first would draw designs by pen on a cotton fabric and then added colors to the design like painting the fabric.

Today, Persian Qalamkary still uses carved handblock Stamping technique. It also has incorporated monochromatic natural colors with the repeated geometric and floral patterns on cotton cloths. This technique requires making many woodblocks, one for each color. The natural colors are applied to its own unique carved block so the repeated details and patterns as stamped and interwoven with each other to make the design.

In principle, my singular Stamping technique on paper is a variation of the repetition design and it echoes this 400 year-old technique. In addition, the action of charging the woodblocks with paint and stamping on the heavy printing paper surface with the wooden handblock is similar to the Qalamkary. This single act of stamping has resulted in quick printing impressions of woodblock textures on the printing paper. It is direct and versatile thus layering has created images that are both transitional and final impressions for the Penobscot Bay series.

The Japanese handprint technique uses Baren for pressing done on the paper over the woodblock. It also uses ink for printmaking. I have used primarily, the archival printing paper to place over the woodblock and used acrylic paint. So, partial textures of underlying woodblocks were saturated with water-based acrylic paint and then printed using hand pressure in its distinctly registered way to position each print as gestural moments in the world.
The power of gesture would show more often when wood textures on the blocks were visible through the over laid paper, with hand pressure, thus hard surfaces of the woodblock grains were spanned into a print. It is the hand pressing, without the use of printing press that allows for discrete shifting of the woodblock and paper to retreat an image of wood surface depths and cross sections into the visibility of print. Thus, consequential revealing of the uneven crevasses and board textures of the block were extended onto the presence imprints by using my own hand-made 6 1/5” Baren.

Finally, for the second layer, I charged the woodblock with another coat of thin layer of acrylic paint for stamping the paper in situ on the dried first impression. By layering there is a sense of imagined spatial and temporal between the layers that mostly visible in a discrete way in an overall sense of the print.

On the outline of the visible quality of the first print, the second layer of impression was made showing the uneven shifts, and fractures fiber of the wood block over the print. The combing techniques of Japanese woodblock printing (the first impression), and second impression of the Persian handblock Stamping technique had made sometime unexpected prints, which suggests further examination. It created many degrees of layering and tensions on the printing paper resulted in suggesting in a unique way the unfolding of the temporal distance as a position and as a way of orienting in the world.

Penobscot Prints Series:
Hand printed (salvaged wood grain) prints are individually made on archival white paper with water-based Ivory black acrylic paint, using Japanese and Persian handblock Stamping techniques.

1/ Penobscot Shift 1 + 2 degrees Latitude 24 X 35 Inches
Japanese and Persian Hand Pressed Print – Wood Grain Impression
Acrylic Ivory Black paint on archival paper

2/ Penobscot Shift 2 + 2 degrees Latitude
24 X 35 Inches
Japanese and Persian Hand Pressed Print – Wood Grain Impression
Acrylic Ivory Black paint on archival paper

3/ Penobscot Drift 1 + 4 degrees Longitude
24 X 35 Inches
Japanese and Persian Hand Pressed Print – Wood Grain Impression
Acrylic Ivory Black paint on archival paper

4/ Penobscot Drift 2 + 4 degrees Longitude
24 X 35 Inches
Japanese and Persian Hand Pressed Print – Wood Grain Impression
Acrylic Ivory Black paint on archival paper

For further information Contact
Parviz Mohassel
bravoparviz@gmail.com