PaintingsDirect.com

"Thunder Bay" (1997)	New York, December 6, 1999 -- PaintingsDirect.com is pleased to present December’s featured artist, Marjorie Tomchuk. Tomchuk is a printmaker who studied at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan and now lives and works in Connecticut. The artist has been making prints for over twenty years. Each print is hand-colored on handmade paper with soft colorful patterns that suggest earth, water, and the cosmos.
PaintingsDirect: Your work is organic in texture yet, at the same time, employs a logical precision in its compositions, using geometric symbols and symmetry. Can you explain your process? Marjorie Tomchuk: I know most of how the final piece will look when I begin. I make many sketches that are very controlled, not at all spontaneous. When I am happy with the design I spend a great deal of time preparing the molds I’ll use to create the paper. Structure seems to be my grounding, so I work a long time to make organized patterns. What I don’t always know is what colors I’m going to use. I leave room to make these decisions later.			"Another Channel" (1993)
PD: Color plays a great role in your work, like in "Another Channel". How do you apply color in these works? MT: I use an airbrush to apply even layers of color, and a small artist’s brush to touch up edges and details.
PD: You indicate that all of your work on our site is either created by embossing or executed on cast paper. What’s the difference between the two? MT: That’s a good question. With an embossing, the sheet of paper has already been made. It is dry and available from my inventory. The embossing is done on an etching press; the roller of the press pushes the dampened paper into the mould/master plate and the inverse image is created. The effect is textural and almost 3-dimensional. My paper is composed of 100% cotton fiber. In the process of “beating” it is necessary for the fibers to remain long, to withstand the pressure of the embossing technique, otherwise the paper could easily crack or tear. When I speak of cast paper, I take freshly beaten pulp (a wet slurry) and place it directly into a mould, which is sitting on a vacuum table. A vacuum pulls water out of the pulp and it also pulls the pulp against the mould to transfer the design. Embossing is the process of creating a raised design using a sheet of paper with a master plate/mould and a press. Cast paper captures the design by using fluid cotton pulp and a vacuum. Cast paper inevitably ends up 4 or 5 times heavier than an embossing.			"Quadrate" (1989)
		Interview continued... page 2