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Contemporary Cape Cod Artists on Abstraction by Deborah Forman
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From The Provincetown Banner— by Susan Rand Brown
August 14, 2008
Tucked in from Commercial Street in the far West End, not far from the breakwater that marks the end of Provincetown Harbor, is a compact, creative sanctuary for printmaker Marty Davis. Enter and find groupings of black and white abstract prints lining the walls, and art-making tools on her workbench: copper plates and carving tools, inks and rollers, elements of this mysterious, Zen-like creative practice that move beyond brush and canvas. “Paintings on a surface” is how Davis refers to the calligraphic, dancing images that could only come from a life-long practitioner of the printmakers’ medium.
A generous sampling of Davis’ printmaking in several formats and sizes, displaying her personal, spontaneous approach, coupled with an uncommon dexterity in controlling this notoriously difficult medium, will be shown Friday, August 15 through Wednesday, September 3, at the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street. An opening reception is 7-10 p.m. Lora Brody, Mike Carroll, Thomas Nozkowski, Doug Padgett, George Perkins, and Joyce Robins (see sidebar page 30) will also show their work.
In addition to her show at the Schoolhouse Gallery, Davis, president of the Fine Arts Work Center’s Board of Trustees, has donated a print to the FAWC’s annual fundraising auction, Saturday, August 16.
Davis’ studio (once a garage) sits surrounded by rose bushes within a property formerly owned by artist Karl Knaths and also used by Agnes Weinrich, both bold-faced names within the fabled lore of Provincetown’s history as a place where American art entered the modern age. Davis, originally from Virginia, has been flourishing in this studio for almost two decades, mindful, as she works, of the legacy of serious art-making surrounding her.
A bucket of assorted brushes sits inside her studio door, undoubtedly Knaths’, left behind in the house basement. The brushes are part of the Feng Shui of the cottage-like studio with its mossy shingled roof. Using one in even a small corner of a piece, Davis feels herself connecting to Knaths, and others working in a remote, unwired Provincetown back when the economy was dominated by fishing, and making art was a single-minded pursuit. She seems cut from the same cloth, an artist who works because she must. Her prints blaze their own trail, swinging from the bold freedom of expressionism, to the ethereal delicacy of antique calligraphy.
While Davis’ work is much more than the sum of its parts, her printmakers’ tools catch the eye. On a long table are inks, some in muted colors, and others in shades of black — vine black, bone black, Renaissance black, and at least ten others — that matter most to her current palette. “It’s the bones,” she says. “There’s a whole world of black and white.”
There are also copper plates and acetate sheets to receive an image, carved or brushed onto their surface; small rollers for applying inks; a large printing press with its heavy roller; and boxes of French deckle-edged paper with enough texture (“tooth”) and thickness to withstand a good drenching, before the heft of the roller bears down to transfer an image from plate to paper.
Then comes the moment of truth, when the paper is peeled from the plate. Often this first print is just the start: re-inked, other prints, or states, from the same plate will bear mysterious gray ghosts, traces of former pressings. “With painting, what you see is what you get,” she begins, her light eyes glowing. “It’s right in front of you. Printmaking is a backward kind of crazy: you work on a plate, think you know what you’ve got, ink it up, wipe it with your hands to get tones all over, then you put it down. If you like it, you do a little more, make another print. It’s always in a state of becoming.”
Her lyrical work is about these layers, lines and tones, and also about process and technique, the exacting complexity and yet magic serendipity of printmaking. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she discovered woodcutting before embracing other forms of printmaking (“I loved paper, I loved ink, I loved everything about it,” she recalls), she also studied etching at the Corcoran, lithography at Pratt, and photo-etching at the Fine Arts Work Center.
One result of this exacting education, and decades of experimentation, is her mastery of a range of practices, some familiar, others less so — aquatint, etching, engraving, dry-point, sugar lifts, carborundum (an abrasive), and chine cole, a collaging method. The combined results often are breathtaking in both grand gesture and detail: and whatever she does is approached with the same curious spirit of someone on a lifelong quest.
This quest once brought her to Kyoto, Japan and an unforgettable demonstration from a Sensei, a master calligrapher. As she describes his animated process, her arms open forward, mirroring his flowing gestures: “In his long robes, he worked on a piece of scroll the size of this room. He took his brush and worked over this paper like a dance; his mind and body were all connected, a moving act of breathing; and I … something just opened up in me.”
His meditative spirit, this feeling of being “very centered,” is something Davis has carried into her own practice. “I think about how I am on a journey, and it will take the rest of my life, trying to even approach his sense of completion.” While this entirely modest artist seems to live quite happily just under the radar, when you see her work, you know: it’s the real thing.
August 14, 2008
Tucked in from Commercial Street in the far West End, not far from the breakwater that marks the end of Provincetown Harbor, is a compact, creative sanctuary for printmaker Marty Davis. Enter and find groupings of black and white abstract prints lining the walls, and art-making tools on her workbench: copper plates and carving tools, inks and rollers, elements of this mysterious, Zen-like creative practice that move beyond brush and canvas. “Paintings on a surface” is how Davis refers to the calligraphic, dancing images that could only come from a life-long practitioner of the printmakers’ medium.
A generous sampling of Davis’ printmaking in several formats and sizes, displaying her personal, spontaneous approach, coupled with an uncommon dexterity in controlling this notoriously difficult medium, will be shown Friday, August 15 through Wednesday, September 3, at the Schoolhouse Gallery, 494 Commercial Street. An opening reception is 7-10 p.m. Lora Brody, Mike Carroll, Thomas Nozkowski, Doug Padgett, George Perkins, and Joyce Robins (see sidebar page 30) will also show their work.
In addition to her show at the Schoolhouse Gallery, Davis, president of the Fine Arts Work Center’s Board of Trustees, has donated a print to the FAWC’s annual fundraising auction, Saturday, August 16.
Davis’ studio (once a garage) sits surrounded by rose bushes within a property formerly owned by artist Karl Knaths and also used by Agnes Weinrich, both bold-faced names within the fabled lore of Provincetown’s history as a place where American art entered the modern age. Davis, originally from Virginia, has been flourishing in this studio for almost two decades, mindful, as she works, of the legacy of serious art-making surrounding her.
A bucket of assorted brushes sits inside her studio door, undoubtedly Knaths’, left behind in the house basement. The brushes are part of the Feng Shui of the cottage-like studio with its mossy shingled roof. Using one in even a small corner of a piece, Davis feels herself connecting to Knaths, and others working in a remote, unwired Provincetown back when the economy was dominated by fishing, and making art was a single-minded pursuit. She seems cut from the same cloth, an artist who works because she must. Her prints blaze their own trail, swinging from the bold freedom of expressionism, to the ethereal delicacy of antique calligraphy.
While Davis’ work is much more than the sum of its parts, her printmakers’ tools catch the eye. On a long table are inks, some in muted colors, and others in shades of black — vine black, bone black, Renaissance black, and at least ten others — that matter most to her current palette. “It’s the bones,” she says. “There’s a whole world of black and white.”
There are also copper plates and acetate sheets to receive an image, carved or brushed onto their surface; small rollers for applying inks; a large printing press with its heavy roller; and boxes of French deckle-edged paper with enough texture (“tooth”) and thickness to withstand a good drenching, before the heft of the roller bears down to transfer an image from plate to paper.
Then comes the moment of truth, when the paper is peeled from the plate. Often this first print is just the start: re-inked, other prints, or states, from the same plate will bear mysterious gray ghosts, traces of former pressings. “With painting, what you see is what you get,” she begins, her light eyes glowing. “It’s right in front of you. Printmaking is a backward kind of crazy: you work on a plate, think you know what you’ve got, ink it up, wipe it with your hands to get tones all over, then you put it down. If you like it, you do a little more, make another print. It’s always in a state of becoming.”
Her lyrical work is about these layers, lines and tones, and also about process and technique, the exacting complexity and yet magic serendipity of printmaking. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she discovered woodcutting before embracing other forms of printmaking (“I loved paper, I loved ink, I loved everything about it,” she recalls), she also studied etching at the Corcoran, lithography at Pratt, and photo-etching at the Fine Arts Work Center.
One result of this exacting education, and decades of experimentation, is her mastery of a range of practices, some familiar, others less so — aquatint, etching, engraving, dry-point, sugar lifts, carborundum (an abrasive), and chine cole, a collaging method. The combined results often are breathtaking in both grand gesture and detail: and whatever she does is approached with the same curious spirit of someone on a lifelong quest.
This quest once brought her to Kyoto, Japan and an unforgettable demonstration from a Sensei, a master calligrapher. As she describes his animated process, her arms open forward, mirroring his flowing gestures: “In his long robes, he worked on a piece of scroll the size of this room. He took his brush and worked over this paper like a dance; his mind and body were all connected, a moving act of breathing; and I … something just opened up in me.”
His meditative spirit, this feeling of being “very centered,” is something Davis has carried into her own practice. “I think about how I am on a journey, and it will take the rest of my life, trying to even approach his sense of completion.” While this entirely modest artist seems to live quite happily just under the radar, when you see her work, you know: it’s the real thing.
