This exhibit will demonstrate the artist’s dual instincts both to conceal and reveal the work's history (and her own) beneath the surface; and at the same time to construct a highly texturized surface. The work in this exhibit is about surface and each of the artists', Carol Blackwell, Edith Green, and Nada Irish, preoccupation with it.

artist statements

Carol Blackwell: email
Carol Blackwell explores surface in her Line/Mind Series via a different mode of construction as each piece is conceived as drawing, as writing, and as painting.  By the obsessive working of the surface, the work demonstrates how, by the flow of graphic, or calligraphic, line, drawing, writing and painting merge into one medium.  Each linear layer is drawn with colored acrylics, sometimes left to dry before the next layer is applied, or alternatively, wet line drawn over wet line, each with its own distinctive effect.  The layers are built up until the surface is almost totally submerged by the continuing flow of line upon line.

Edith Green: email
Edith Green approaches surface in her Doorway Series paintings by beginning with a delineation of the door’s outline on canvas.  Then the slow, considered build-up of surface commences.  She paints, scrapes, sands, repaints, scratches, collages, distresses and repaints until a history of the painting resides beneath the lush but abraided surface.  The doors are the vehicle Green employs for realizing her actual subject­surface.

Nadia Irish: email
Nadia Irish creates surfaces in her Cave Wall Series as a printmaker.  The saturated and textured surfaces of her monoprints also require an arduous building process that involves inking (painting) a metal or plexi printing plate, wiping away some of the ink, blotting, re-inking, drawing into the paint, masking away part of this image and re-inking until the plate is sufficiently built-up and ready to receive damp paper that next goes through the etching press.  After the paper and paint are dried, the process begins again, often passing through the press many times until a complex history of each monoprint exists beneath and on the surface.  Each mark made on the printing plate leaves its ghostly image on the final print, hovering mysteriously beneath the surface.