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by Vanessa Conte
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The four artists featured in this month’s exhibition use unconventional paper techniques to extend imagery beyond the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane. Pulping, molding, weaving and folding are just a few of the inventive studio practices that satisfy these artists’ passion for the tactile.
Featuring work by Anne Youkeles, Marilyn Weiss, Alice Brickner and Marjorie Tomchuk.
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Anne Youkeles
In order to fully realize her aesthetic goals, abstract painter Anne Youkeles incorporates three-dimensional aspects into her work. The artist’s aim is to “combine small parts or modules to fashion a larger cohesive work, the sum of the parts.” In Youkeles’ completely two-dimensional pieces, closely-fitted shapes cover the surface from top to bottom. This quilt-like tiling successfully illustrates unity. However, the artist decided to push the idea even further by raising the mosaic-like composition from the canvas. |
Quadrille (1998)
Anne Youkeles |
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Youkeles uses several methods for adding this three-dimensional layer. In Configuration III the artist dyes and molds paper pulp into colorful, inter-locking shapes. Each uniquely contoured unit relies on its neighboring forms to hold its place, calling attention to the role of the individual within a larger system. In Sunrise, Youkeles prints a pattern on small pieces of canvas that she later folds, paints and arranges into a triangular grid. Here, the cohesive body is the sum of several repeated forms.
Sign the guestbook of Anne Youkeles. |
Configuration III (1996)
Anne Youkeles |
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Marilyn Weiss
Marilyn Weiss has always considered herself a collagist, having worked in mixed media since 1965. Her experience with and predilection for a wide variety of materials allows the artist to react spontaneously, combining paint, found and recycled paper, string, gauze and whatever else catches her eye while traveling. “I go wherever the materials, and the feelings they provoke, take me. I ‘listen’ and ‘tune-in’ to each piece I’m working on and get inspiration from the materials I surrender myself to.”
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Now (1999)
Marilyn Weiss |
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Informed by her previous experience in the field of fashion design, Weiss has a sensibility for both the color and texture of materials, and what kind of feeling they can ultimately evoke. In her Dress series, the artist presses inked pieces of burlap and gauze, loosely shaped as dresses, into paper, leaving the ghostly print of a disembodied garment. In a reclining nude titled Sleeping Beauty Again, Weiss layers torn pieces of Chinese papers around the drawn figure to emulate the unfussy nature of crumpled drapery.
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Sleeping Beauty Again (1998)
Marilyn Weiss |
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“I use the parts that other people toss away,” says Weiss, referring to the variety and economy of her technique. The sources of the shards of thread, scrim and fabric are unimportant to the artist, since she prefers to negate their identities and project her own story.
Sign the guestbook of Marilyn Weiss. |
The Dress #1 (1999)
Marilyn Weiss |
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Alice Brickner
Alice Brickner takes apart and weaves her watercolors to simulate the reflected light of sunbeams and water. The artist’s goal is “to catch the bounce and movement of light,” by fragmenting her images of deserts and flower fields, and reconstructing them to form an image that vibrates in the eyes of her viewers.
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Dandelion Field Mosaic II (1994)
Alice Brickner |
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Brickner invented three techniques to achieve an effect of broken light. The first, called a ‘woven picture’, is created by cutting and weaving two paintings together. The two pieces often portray similar subjects to maintain their fluidity, and to emphasize lighting. The second technique, a ‘woven mosaic’, goes one step beyond the woven picture; the original image is cut into small squares and then tiled together like a mosaic. The third, called a ‘strip collage’ solely employs cutting. The artist moves the strips up, down and sideways and mounts the new composition onto a separate piece of paper or canvas.
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Collage Landscape with Reeds (1998)
Alice Brickner |
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In a set of strip collages based on water, Brickner alternates between vertical and horizontal stripping to demonstrate the life of the ocean on two particular days: the vertical movement implies a livelier current, and the horizontal is used to portray serenity. By physically reorganizing the strips, the artist is able to recreate the effect of light on her subject.
Sign the guestbook of Alice Brickner. |
Waves IV (1998)
Alice Brickner |
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Marjorie Tomchuk
Whereas Brickner paints an image on the paper that she later manipulates to achieve her final result, Marjorie Tomchuk creates the paper itself. Working as a print and paper maker for twenty years, she aims to bridge the gap between process and subject.
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Balance (1995)
Marjorie Tomchuk |
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Tomchuk arrived at her fluid, paper-making technique by experimenting with its “capacity for deep embossing,” a printmaking practice that complements the artist’s graphic style. In this process, the paper must first be saturated, then impressed by a plate or mold, and dried by a vacuum table that draws the water from the paper’s cotton fibers. The paper then dries into a solid relief print that Tomchuk airbrushes with colorful pigments.
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Thunder Bay (1997)
Marjorie Tomchuk |
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Tomchuk’s compositions take their cue directly from nature, balancing organic curves and faded edges. Especially drawn to water, she frequents beaches to observe the rhythm of the rolling surf and powerful tide. “There is something about the force of the water that speaks to me with its vast, curving waves.” The high relief and deep crevices of Tomchuk’s aquatic prints can be interpreted as emulations of the bellowing sea. The artist’s skilled control of her process gives her a “direct tie” to the natural elements she reveres.
Sign the guestbook of Marjorie Tomchuk.
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Neptune's Path (1997)
Marjorie Tomchuk |
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