Gallery Talk at RAG
Mary Louise Kalin, whose work is on exhibit at The Roxbury Arts Group’s Walt Meade Gallery as part of “A Family in the Arts,” will give a gallery talk on Saturday, August 25 at 1 pm. Kalin will talk about all aspects of print-making from simple print techniques that even children can work with to more complex print making techniques on fiber, paper and other surfaces. Kalin welcomes participants to bring questions about their own print making efforts.
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| Citron by Louise Kalin, monotype |
Kalin holds a fine arts degree from The Rhode Island School of Design and has studied printmaking with Dan Wheldon and Anne MacLeod. She has had fellowships at the MacDowall Colony and St. Anselm College. She has had several solo exhibitions throughout New England and her work has appeared in juried exhibitions throughout the United Sates and is held in many private and corporate collections.
Kalin , who makes her home in Columbia County, acknowledges her parents’ and the Catskills landscape’s influence on her artistic growth: “I grew up in the Catskills when dairy farms divided the valleys and slopes of the mountains into geometries of color: hayfields, pastures with cows, and two hundred years of architecture- settlement s of stone & wood, from early Dutch stone dwellings to stoic white Greek Revival farmhouses. When I was nine my family moved to Cape Cod where we had always summered.
Although I drew and painted with my father who was a landscape painter and a believer in pure color- after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design, I continued printmaking and mixed media, which I'd learned from my mother- my art teacher in high school. I began translating landscape into geometric layers of color, reminiscent of American vernacular quilts and architecture. Borrowing from Amish quilts and the color studies of Josef Albers, I adapted a geometric format for color experimentation. These prints grew into mixed media pieces, with collage and markings, resembling textiles. The outside geometry of the squares sheltered the interior landscape- the more delicate, hand drawn images and fragile collages in the center of each piece. They followed each other, becoming triptychs and series.
A fellowship at the McDowell Colony afforded me a departure from the geometric format; I started doing prints of iron markings. I'd dreamt of my forearms and their likeness to naked wood. These became sculptures of peeled hickory sticks, vertically joined, resembling corn shafts, tied, with crows cawing from the tops. Others were nested, painted with graphite and midnight blue pigment, with wooden spheres within (gold leafed in the phases of the moon). The materials and subjects were so much a part of my childhood. The geometric prints were released from their outside boundaries, becoming asymmetrical and soft- edged.
The discipline of making order and arranging things, combined with new printing techniques and hand made papers, leads me forward.”
The exhibit at The Walt Meade Gallery in which Kalin shares the walls with her brother John, her sister Anne and their parents, Pauline and James, will continue through September 3. Gallery hours are : Monday- Friday 10-4, Sat. 1-4, Sunday, 10 am -2 pm, and by appointment – (607) 326-7908.