Flower Power V (detail) by Susan Goldman

The World is Going to Hell and I am Printing Yellow!

about the exhibition | artists’ talk

About the Artists

Susan Goldman

My recent prints explore the sheer pleasure and sensuality of color and form. The circle, the target, the mandala, open fields of color filling the eyes and expanding breath down into the stomach, the center, the core have exploded out of the center of my obsession with the flower and vessel form.

I experience pure beauty and pleasure in their making. These simple, pure, and timeless images heal through their visceral and meditative qualities. I take respite from an unrelenting and aggressive environment in the creation of these highly saturated, colorful life size totems. Like an archer aiming for the bull’s eye, concentration and calm focus are required. The center is off center. It is not perfect, but we perceive it to be perfect. Seeing through our eye, the pupil, the target is always moving, but we keep trying to aim for the center, aiming for balance and perfection, an illusion to be in control. Throughout history the human need to create beauty and order out of chaos, has sustained and restored us through immeasurably challenging times. The world may be going to hell, but I am printing yellow and it feels great!

Sujata Gopalan

Historically, my work has taken a few divergent paths. I am interested in more than one genre or medium; I am trained in printmaking, attracted to painting, rely on drawing. I have become engrossed in the visual inspection of landscape, people and of the details of my own life. I have referenced trees, insects, shoes, pincushions, my mother and a gamut of other things which have some particular place in my universe. My work is diaristic. In a sense, I’m interested in the moment; I look at a place or a person or a thing at a specific moment in time. I expect the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions while I merely provide the inference.

My work is not political or angst-laden. I strive to make images that are honest and without subterfuge. Often, the concept succumbs to the process and the work becomes as much about the drawing or painting or printmaking, as the idea.

My last body of work addresses the concept of displacement, specifically the displacement of immigrants. Having emigrated to the United States at a young age, part of my own psyche is bounded by the experience of changing cultures. I examine the differences and similarities by inspecting the minutia, the objects of everyday life, in one culture versus another: an embroidered green dress to a sailor dress, a rag doll to Barbie. Collectively, these things represent the dichotomy of two different worlds, to each of which I belong. This body of work also speaks to our self-actualization as women; how we perceive ourselves; how our experiences and upbringing affect who we become.

Ultimately, there is a thread that connects all of the work together. My color and formal sensibilities, which draw upon my training as well as my cultural background, and my interest in creating a rich visual, if not tactile, surface, are reflected in the drawings, prints and paintings. I hope that my work remains truthful and continues to evolve even as I do.

Anita Jung

Anita Jung is interested in aspects of the ephemeral, the overlooked, and unwanted. Her work is comprised of elements that have been discarded. Through repurposing these become visual metaphors for contemporary places and experiences.

Barbara Kerne

Tarot Cuts through the Woods

Nature’s resonance is cathartic for me, soothing, healing, and inspiring, so I image natural forms of connection with lyrical expression. In this series, Tarot Cuts through the Woods, the natural forms ebb and flow to conjure our futures, as oracles, as well as present equanimity that I always long for. While Ad Reinhardt, Jimmy Ernst, and Sidney Gross were important teachers for me, I have developed my own voice, female and naturalistic, abstract and realistic, in which I transcendentally soften the world’s hard-edged lines through interpretive painting and printmaking.

Bridget Sue Lambert

I spent my childhood rearranging the lives of the dolls that inhabited the dollhouse my grandfather built for me when I was five years old. Over the last 7 years, I used this dollhouse to construct—and photograph and print—scenes that simulate the emotional and physical clutter surrounding romantic relationships as well as a woman’s relationship with herself.

I explore the physical and psychological stages couples inhabit by photographing old dollhouses, miniature furniture and vintage dolls. I create large size pigment prints of ordinary intimate scenes and voyeuristic portraits and am interested in evoking the tensions, anxiety, and muddle that exist in these private spaces. The things we all strive to keep hidden behind closed doors. I manipulate the viewer’s sense of time and space and offer frozen tableaux that suggest a living narrative. Messy beds, knocked over drinks, bras and clothing flung on the floor hint at feelings of lust, desire, fear, love, faith, anticipation, and expectation. I distill personal experiences and draw on memories and images from both childhood and adulthood to engage in a contemporary discourse.

The ironic titles of my work are inspired by self-¬-help relationship books, instant message texts and the season finale of The Bachelor and allow me to make light of uncomfortable situations. Although I present constructed vignettes peppered with references to popular culture, I demonstrate the universality of human reactions and emotions.

Kathryn Maxwell

My interest in genetics and the broad connections among groups has translated into a new body of work that explores the grandest connection of all—the relation of humans to the universe. Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” It seems we are connected to the universe through our very beings. We are all part of the whole and it is a part of us.

Miriam Mörsel Nathan

My work—
mostly fragments or traces of time and place.
Memory occasionally
and poetry always.

You know how one word in a poem opens
an interior door over and over.

I am always surprised.

Patricia Underwood

Patricia Underwood is a Washington based mixed media artist / printmaker whose use of materials and symbols in such sophisticated and subtle ways has led her work to be described as evocative, complex and richly textured. Content encompasses nature, human spirituality and healing. After studying the Japanese language, she began to interpret music (a universal language) through her own visual calligraphy, which finds it’s way into almost all of her work.

Her latest body of work “At the Table”, was created for the exhibiton “THE WORLD IS GOING TO HELL, AND I AM PRINTING YELLOW!”. The implied absurdity in the show’s title (concern for choosing a color when there are greater concerns) belies the real importance of the act in a time when the world does seem as if it is coming apart. Artmaking is the sustainance needed to deal with this world. “At the Table” uses her signature symbols to explores the simple yet very complex act of coming ‘to the table’ to break bread.

Eve Stockton

Eve Stockton’s woodcuts are inspired by close observation of nature and an eclectic interest in science. Utilizing a multifaceted background in architecture and art, Eve is able to engage the variables of printmaking, allowing her to produce an ongoing body of dynamic, graphic images. The Agrarian Ensemble is exemplary of Stockton’s ongoing investigation of the natural world.

The presentation of her prints in ensemble groupings helps Stockton to better enlarge on her themes of variation, change, and evolution. With her balancing of representation and abstraction, the Agrarian prints suggest a seasonal passage of time that she hopes viewers will find meditative and playful.

Her large woodcuts are printed from three-foot square woodblocks that she carves, a different block for each color layer. Her prints are made with the assistance of master printer, Chris Shore, at The Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, CT and Susan Goldman of Lily Press in Rockville, MD. Since 2005, Eve’s art has been regularly featured on the cover of Nature Genetics Magazine

Judit Varga

Finding the perfect balance between shape, color, surface and structure is always a challenge, an emotional struggle. The mere existence of this powerful energy makes it so appealing to me to work with clay. My work has a strong connection with nature and its organic structures which is built upon. I’m not interested in simply copying the forms and textures rather I wish to understand the reasons and relations which lay beneath the surface of a shiny pod or a weather-worn shell.

My inspiration comes from these small artifacts I collect on walks or trips with my family. These fragile imprints of nature provide me with rich visual vocabulary, endless shapes and colors. I work in a quiet solitude in my studio and find this peaceful loneliness a perfect stage for my play with clay. In the silence sometimes there is a moment of harmony when the clay and I understand each other perfectly, we know exactly what the other one wants to do. Those are the moments that I long for and this longing draws me back to the studio to open up a new bag of clay and start again.