Arts & Leisure
Exhibition of York-Ogunquit printmakers at River Tree
By Rose Safran
KENNEBUNK - In conjunction with the Maine Print Project, which celebrates 200 years of printmaking, River Tree Center for the Arts has mounted "The Art of Printmaking," featuring a variety of fine prints by several York-Ogunquit artists, namely Nancy Davison, Don Gorvett, Beverly Hallam, Michael Walek and DeWitt Hardy, all members of the Ogunquit Art Association.The exhibition also includes monotypes and collagraphs by Kennebunk artist Kate Cheney Chappell and a 12-panel silkscreen series, "Domestic Partners II," created in 2004 by University of Southern Maine teacher Sean Cahil.
In limiting this print exhibition to seven artists, the River Tree Center grants each one ample opportunity to show a significant portion of his or her work, thereby giving viewers a "feeling" for the artist's style and approach to the print medium, as well as inherent message.
De Witt Hardy's striking lithographs (only one of which is for sale) "After the Storm" and "Girl in Green" as well as "Straight Chair" reflect the fluid style with which we are so familiar in his popular watercolors. Don Gorvett's reduction woodcuts, some of which were shown earlier this year in the York Public Library, bring us a series of boldly executed views of such familiar places as Wentworth by the Sea, coves, shipyards, the Marginal Way in winter, and as well as an interpretation of the North Shore's Gloucester. Nancy Davison's hand-colored realistic and detailed etchings reflect local places such as Portsmouth bridges as well as her travels to Japan and elsewhere, in particular Provence and Arles. Beverly Hallam tends towards the modernist in a series of oil monotypes reflecting her interest in the form and color found in arrangements of floral still life as well as in a series of striking, vividly colorful inks. Michael Walek surprises with his technical mixes, adding watercolor to prints in such works as "Ramses III" and "The Voyeur."
Each 22-by-22-inch panel in the 12-panel series by Joel Seah, in which forms and colors are repeated, has a separate message, related to gay-lesbian coupling. The work has the cohesiveness in pattern of a carefully thought-out quilt design. Comments the artist on this work, "Several of the screen prints in 'Domestic Partners II' evoke Rorschach tests. For so many Americans, gay, straight and bi, the marriage issue is something onto which they project their deepest anxieties and hopes. It's a nefarious assault on a pillar of western civilization, it's a sell-out of a once liberationist movement, it's the latest front in the struggle for a more equitable society. Many of these screen prints ... reflect the inscrutability of gays and lesbians. As in anti-Semitic narratives, one of the greatest phobias of gays is that one cannot always pick us out, that we wield disproportionate cultural and political power. We blend in and are therefore that much more of a threat."
Additionally, there is also an exhibit on historic prints of the Kennebunks. Both exhibits will remain on view through Nov. 29.
