Tw o A r t i s t s : M a n y J o u r n e y s M A R G A R E T A D A M S PA R K E R E TC H I N G S C A R O L E N E L S O N W O O D C U T S NOVEMBER 28, - JANUARY 2, 2011 Opening Reception: Friday, December 3, 5:30-9pm Artist Talks & Demonstrations: December 4 & 11, 1-4pm WASHINGTON PRINTMAKERS GALLERY 8230 Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD
We n o r m a l l y t h i n k o f j o u r n e y s a s o c c u r r i n g a c r o s s p h y s i c a l l a n d s c a p e s : t h e t e r r a i n w e e x p e r i e n c e a t h o m e o r a s w e t r a v e l. B u t j o u r n e y s c a n l e a d u s i n t o s m a l l p l a c e s, a s w e e x p l o r e t h e l a n d s c a p e o f a s h e l l o r a p o d o r a s e e d h e a d. T h e r e a r e a l s o t h e l a n d s c a p e s o f a f a c e o r a b o d y, e v e n o f a d r e a m, a r e v e r i e, o r a n i d e a. A n d t h e r e i s t h e t e r r a i n w e c r o s s i n t h e g r e a t e r j o u r n e y s o f b i r t h a n d d e a t h. O u r e x p e r i e n c e s o n m a n y o f t h e s e j o u r n e y s a r e r e f l e c t e d i n t h i s s h o w. 2
Introduction 2 Two Artists, Many Journeys, essay by Max-Karl Winkler 4 Margaret Adams Parker, selected prints from the exhibition 7 Carole Nelson, selected prints from the exhibition 12 Brief biographies of the artists 17 Checklist of pr ints in the ex hi bition 18 Images on front: Carole Nelson, Marvdasht, woodcut, 9 x 9 Margaret Adams Parker, Toward the Duomo, Tuscan Light (State 2), etching, 11.5 x5 3
Tw o A r t i s t s, M a n y J o u r n e y s Every work of art is in some sense a journey, both for the artist and for the viewer. With this exhibition, Carole Nelson and Margaret Adams Parker have made journeys, both actual and symbolic, that invite our participation, our response, and our interpretation. These two artists, with their striking contrasts in medium, technique, and vision, are particularly suited to provide a spectrum of approaches to the concept of the journey. Parker has produced a series of intaglio prints, while Nelson works in relief; Parker s prints are largely monochrome, while Nelson s are multicolored; Parker works out of the long tradition of drawing from observation, and Nelson from a tradition that gives primacy to design. With these disparate ways of seeing and making, they provide a veritable classroom for the student of printmaking. Margaret Adams Parker, after a decade or more of concentration on woodcut, has in recent years turned or returned to the exploration of etching and drypoint. This marks a change from relief to intaglio, from hard edges to tonal subtlety, and from a concern with line and shape to a concern for value and volume. She is a sculptor as well as a printmaker a recent sculpture, Esau ran to meet him, is included in this exhibition and this increasing regard for the form-revealing quality of light could be a development that brings her two-dimensional work into closer relation to the sculpture. Parker s work here falls into five broad categories of subject: landscapes and large natural forms, small natural forms, figures at rest and in motion, images of birth and death, and images from travels. What unites these subjects is, essentially, drawing: etching with line and cross-hatching, roulette, drypoint. These are means of description, and Parker is always concerned with recording the object; but they are also means of composing the picture, of heightening its drama and of establishing mood, and Parker s work demonstrates her attention to these aspects as well. She wants to describe volumes: objects large and small, dark interior and bright exterior spaces, figures slumped and stocky and in motion. One of the values of seeing a large number of works by any artist is the opportunity to discern themes and patterns that escape notice when the works are seen individually. One such pattern in Parker s work is the long narrow format, whether horizontal as in Otter Creek and Whitesands Bay Pembrokeshire, Wales, or vertical as in Dark Hollow Falls. A format of this kind is arresting in itself, yet it is so well suited to the subject that one hardly notices the print s shape. Parker seems to delight, too, in describing complicated and interlocking forms, like the writhing and intertwined Roots, in the Light and Ancient Hawthorn. In some of the prints the complication occurs not in objects but in spaces: Out through the Arches, for instance, describes a steep street or alley that curves and angles down into a valley; buildings closing in on either side and connected by upper-story arched passageways; stepped walls and stairs leading to upper doorways an almost Piranesi-like setting, but this one, exterior and bright, flooded with Italian sun. 4
Another aspect of Parker s interest in complication is her fondness for serial presentation, which takes a number of forms. At its simplest, as in Three Views of a Shell, the subject is shown from three points of view; in Refugees in Winter the subject is treated as a diptych; and Toward the Duomo, Tuscan Light is exhibited in three states, a kind of progression that is always of interest to the student of printmaking. Even The measure of our lives portfolio exhibits a kind of progression, with images of the newborn child, the pregnant woman, the nursing mother, and the grieving elder. If Margaret Adams Parker is a recorder (with the reminder that the root of record is the Latin word for heart ), Carole Nelson s prints appear to come from a form of recollection that begins with the object or the experience, which then undergoes a process of distillation, experimentation, and design. She works in woodcut, which lends itself to strong shapes and patterns, but her use of multiple colors in small editions results in works that are unusually colorful and painterly. Nelson s works in this exhibition fall into three groups which she has termed the Legendary Fruit Series, the Ruya Series, and the Iran Series. The Legendary Fruit Series, the most recent of the works shown here, developed into two versions, with an early set of three images which, in Nelson s own words, were strangely reminiscent of miniature paintings or religious handbills. These images, whose subjects are a pear, a peach, and a plum, were reinterpreted for a collaborative book project; the resulting book is exhibited here for the first time. In both versions there is a multiplication of borders, with the fruit at the center of a nest of rectangles, a design technique reminiscent of medieval Persian painting and book illustration. This connection with Persian art is not accidental. Nelson spent some significant years (and, one presumes, artistically formative ones) in Iran, and the influences of Middle Eastern culture are visible in many aspects of her work. The Ruya Series, indeed, is named for a character Ruya, whose name means dream in Orhan Pamuk s novel The Black Book. These are recent works of which Nelson has written,...i searched in a series of dreamlike prints with images strangely reminiscent of amusement parks. These are monoprints, and the artist was therefore able to achieve gradations of color with the brayer that would have been impossible in an edition. Some of the prints in this series embody an unusual characteristic of Nelson s woodcuts: they frequently employ recognizable images a figure, a window, a minaret with otherwise abstract elements. There are suggestions of architecture and of atmosphere that are not so discernible in the other series. The Iran Series began after the artist s 2004 return to Iran following a 35-year absence; it is her attempt to express her respect for that country and its culture. These five works, named for sites the artist visited in central Iran, are unified by their strong black and blue and blue-black shapes contrasting with pale blue-greens and small strong red-oranges; the latest of the series, Tehran and Natanz, more somber in 5
tone and more geometric in composition, were produced in response to the political upheaval in Iran in 2009. The Iran Series are complicated, dynamic compositions, with little of the quiet stability of the Journey of Legendary Fruit prints. It often seems that the only quality any two artists have in common is the making of pictures. Carole Nelson and Margaret Adams Parker represent nearly opposite approaches to picture-making. Parker s works are firmly rooted in the observed world; she is one of those artists who find in the environment subjects or compositions that provide a visual (and often a spiritual) meaning that goes beyond the objects themselves. Nelson, by contrast, seems to respond to more abstract impulses dreams, memories, fantasies whose images and themes become abstract or semiabstract works that nevertheless refer back to those observed or experienced origins. What these artists share, however, is of more significance than their very obvious differences. They are responding in their individual ways to meaningful experiences, observations, and events. It is not often that artists of such different visions exhibit together; we are the beneficiaries of their decision to do so. Max-Karl Winkler Max-Karl Winkler is an artist, illustrator, and teacher in the Washington metropolitan area; he is a member of Washington Printmakers Gallery. 6
Margaret Adams Parker, Ancient Hawthorn, etching, 5.5 x 8 7
Margaret Adams Parker, Out through the Arches, etching, 15 x 5.5 8
Margaret Adams Parker, Three Views of a Shell, etching, 11 x 4.5 9
Margaret Adams Parker, Asleep at Five Months, etching, 8.5 x 5 10
Margaret Adams Parker, Conversation, Crosstown Bus, etching, 5.5 x 7.5 11
Carole Nelson, Pot-ed Plum, woodcut, 14.75 x 7.5 12
Carole Nelson, Ruya 2, woodcut, 10.75 x 9 13
Carole Nelson, Natanz, woodcut, 12 x 7 14
Carole Nelson, Shiraz, woodcut, 9 x 6 15
Carole Nelson, Tehran 2009, woodcut, 12.5 x 8.5 16
About the artists Margaret Adams Parker is a printmaker and sculptor whose works often deal w ith religious and social justice themes. WOMEN, her suite of 15 woodcuts, is in the collection of the Librar y of Congress; A frican Exodus ser ves as the frontispiece to the UNHCR publication, Refugee Children; and 20 woodcuts illustrate W ho Are You, My Daughter? Reading R uth through Image and Text. Her sculpture M ARY is installed at the Cathedral College at Washington National Cathedral and churches across the countr y; Reconciliation was commissioned by Duke Div inity School; and Grieving was under f inal consideration for Alexandria s Contrabands and Freedmen s Cemeter y Memorial. A graduate of Wellesley College, Parker earned the MFA degree from American University, where she was awarded the Wolpof f Prize for Works on Paper and the Glassman Award as Outstanding Woman Artist. She received a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Painting and has been a Coolidge Fellow at the Association for Religion and Intellectual Life. Parker taught for 17 years at the Art League School at the Torpedo Factor y (Alexandria, VA) and has ser ved on the adjunct faculty at Virginia Theological Seminar y since 1991. www.margaretadamsparker.com Carole Nelson is a f ine arts graduate of the Cooper Union in New York City and the University of California Berkeley, and she holds a Master of Fine Arts degree w ith an Award for Excellence in the Graphic Arts from the University of Chicago, where she studied traditional Japanese printmaking. She has received awards for painting and printmaking, including the George Waite Jur y Prize and First in Show for painting at the prestigious Chicago and Area Show. Her woodblock prints have been commissioned for publications, including the Chicago Review and Chicago Magazine and Mahfil, the magazine of the University of Chicago Department of South Asian Languages. She has prov ided costume and set designs for the theatre, including productions of Sophocles Electra and Bertolt Brecht s Caucasian Chalk Circle. Her woodblock prints are characterized by sensuous line and color and are produced by handwork only; no press is used and all cuts are made w ith small knives and gouges. As a result, w ithin a series there may only be one print of a kind. 17
Prints in the exhibition Margaret Adams Parker: Movement and growth Roots, in the Light with roulette 6 x 3.5 Rives Grey Ancient Hawthorn with roulette 5.5 x 8 Rives Grey Roots, 1 4 x 5 Somerset Newsprint Grey 1998 Roots, 2 4 x 5 Somerset Newsprint Grey 1998 Otter Creek, West Virginia 6 x 18 Rives BFK 1998 Dark Hollow Falls 11.5 x 5.5 Somerset Newsprint Grey Whitesands Bay Pembrokeshire, Wales 6 x 17 Rives BFK 1999 Margaret Adams Parker: Natural interiors Eucalyptus Pods, from Carole s Garden Drypoint with roulette 5.5 x 9 Edition of 10 Somerset Antique Milkweed Pods 10.5 x 6 Rives Tan Three Views of a Shell 11 x 4.5 Somerset Antique Pepper 3.5 x 4.5 Rives BFK 2007 18
Prints in the exhibition Margaret Adams Parker: Observing the interior journey On the Trolley with roulette 5.5 x 6.5 Rives Grey Early Morning Bus with roulette 5.5 x 4.5 Pescia Grey Waiting for the Night Train with roulette 5.5 x 8 Pescia Grey Asleep on the Subway 8 x 5 Rives Grey Night Bus Stop 3 x 2 Rives BFK 1995 On the Bus 3 x 3 Rives BFK 1998 Conversation, Crosstown Bus 5.5 x 7.5 Rives Grey Night Subway with roulette 5 x 4 Rives BFK 1995 Margaret Adams Parker: The measure of our lives At Eight Months 5 x 6.5 Somerset Newsprint Grey Nursing 5 x 6.5 Somerset Newsprint Grey Asleep at Five Months 8.5 x 5 Somerset Antique I will fear no evil with roulette 9.5 x 4.5 Somerset Antique Blessed are they that mourn 7 x 5 Rives BFK 1996 Refugees in Winter 2 plates, each 8 x 5 Rives BFK 1995 Esau ran to meet him Plaster over armature, mounted on wood H -16 Model for bronze Edition of 4 The sculpture was commissioned for Repair the Future, a conference on Reconciliation held in Weimar, Germany in August,, and which concluded with a pilgrimage to Buchenwald. 19
Prints in the exhibition Margaret Adams Parker: Sites on the journey Toward the Duomo, Tuscan Light - State 1 11 x 5.5 Edition of 10 Somerset Newsprint Grey Toward the Duomo, Tuscan Light - State 3 11 x 5.5 Edition of 15 Somerset Newsprint Grey Train Station Entrance 9 x 7 Rives BFK 1987 Toward the Duomo, Tuscan Light - State 2, 11 x 5.5 Edition of 15 Somerset Newsprint Grey Out through the Arches 15 x 5.5 Rives Grey Carole Nelson: Journeys of Legendary Fruit Series Wing-ed Peach 9 x 11 1/3 2009 Foot-ed Pear 9 x 11 2/3 2009 Pot-ed Plum 14 ¾ x 7 ½ Kozo 2009 Peach 9 x 11 ¼ Plum 9 x 11 ¼ 1/3 Pear 9 x 11 ¼ 3/3 Pear 9 x 11 ¼ Journeys of Legendary Fruit Artist Book s with hand written text 1/3 and miscellaneous papers 11 x 15 Contains Plum 3/3, Pear 2/3, and Peach 1/3 Bound with text 20
Prints in the exhibition Carole Nelson: Iran Series Persepolis 8 ½ x 6 ½ 2005 Natanz 12 x 7 Tehran 2009 12 ½ x 8 ½ Kitakata 2009 Marvdasht 9 x 9 2005 Carole Nelson: Ruya Series Shiraz 9 x 6 2/3 2005 Ruya 1 - Swing 10 ¾ x 9 Ruya 2 - Nets 10 ¾ x 9 Ruya 2 - Nets (red) 10 ¾ x 9 2/2 Ruya 2 - Nets (blue) 11 x 9 Ruya 3 - Ride 10 ¾ x 9 Ruya 3 - Ride (flames) 10 ¾ x 9 Ruya 4 -Ride (with smoke) 11 ½ x 9 ½ 21