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Union College, Atrium Exhibits | Katie DeGroot, 2014
Enjoy this introspective by Katie DeGroot on her portfolio, “A Tribute to Dead Flowers” and the works of artist Garry Mitchell for the Union College Visual Arts Department.
These intaglios are from a portfolio of prints titled A Tribute To Dead Flowers. This series is a celebration of the organic process of deterioration and decay that all living things go through. While flowers have been used as a symbol of temporal beauty throughout history, artists have traditionally shown them as perfectly beautiful, fresh and in bloom.
I am much more interested in the individual flower as it fades and its unique structure and character become more apparent with age. In that sense these works are portraits and not botanical illustrations. Intaglio printmaking is the perfect medium for me to create these images.
Printmaking is also a wonderfully organic process. I enjoy exploiting the accidents and spontaneous variations that happen while working on a print plate.
At first glance it may appear that Garry Mitchell’s monoprints and my intaglio prints have very little in common. Garry’s prints are colorful and abstract, while mine are more representational and black and white. As printmakers, what we have in common is the willingness to experiment in the print shop, and embrace the happy accidents that the printing process itself offers artists.
When I first met Garry at Yaddo he was working in both the print shop and a painting studio. Part of the process he uses to make paintings involves a large rubber roller that is traditionally used for rolling ink. Garry starts the painting by spreading out oil paint and applying it to the painting surface using the roller. He then works on the surface of the painting, editing, reworking and refining the image. This method is quite similar to making a monoprint and I think the conversation he has back and forth between mediums enriches both the paintings and prints.
Garry and I also create work thinking about the tension between surface and illusion. My image may be of “real” plants but I want you to also see that it’s “really” created by marks made by my hand, and those happy accidents we love so much as printmakers. Garry’s images are wonderfully veiled and mysterious, with a very active physical surface that still invites you into a deceitfully deep space.
The images that Gary Mitchell and I produce as prints can not be created by any other art process. As artists we embrace printmaking for the unique and rewarding experience that it is.
The paintings begin as parking lots for shapes on colored surfaces. Almost anything will work to get a painting going: the shape of a leaf or maybe the shape of the negative space between parts of a chair.
The idea is to put something into play and then react to it. Over the life of a painting I’ll rework the surface many times. The shapes I’ve parked on the surface move around, becoming conflated, simplified, obscured, or eliminated altogether. At times everything gets submerged in a layer of paint. I excavate new
shapes or networks from the wet surface.
There’s the surprise of recovering traces from below and letting those fragments become a new image. The result depends on a dialogue between randomness and control. At issue is the amalgamation of the intuitive and the systematic in an image that makes fresh emotional, as well as intricate visual, sense.