Five Maryland Printmakers: Recent Work
Loyola College Art Gallery October 6-November 5, 1998
by Janet Maher
(Archived version from January, 1999 - click here for current)

From the Maryland Printmakers Show at Loyola - At left: Tonia Matthews' Scissors, etching, drypoint.  Left: Alice Feldman's Panoramic Sweep, woodcut diptych.

Cynthia Alderdice, Aline Feldman, Richard Hellman, Tonia Matthews and Caroline Thorington each with their own unique twists and fresh visions collectively represent the areas of lithography, etching, woodblock, screenprint, pulp painting, and letterpress. Hovering between the boundaries of printmaking, Cynthia Alderdice shows richly surfaced works in which the structure of the paper is an integral part of the completed imagery. Colored paper pulp combines with additional layers of color which have been printed in both the recessed lines of large woodblocks and relief rolled from their surfaces. Striking abstractions are created of iconographic symbols and complex patterns of energetic marks.

Aline Feldman prints in the traditional Japanese method, where each impression originates as a watercolor painting on the surface of the carved wood. Her non-traditional white-line approach reveals what has been carved, resulting in a complex web of linear and abstractly patterned movement throughout her compositions. Whether the content be aerial views of urban or country landscape, her work reads as lightfilled celebrations of the marks in uplifting Caribbean-like colors. A collaborative book project with the poet Karen Arnold is also shown, which adds letterpress printing and fine boxmaking to the mix of techniques.

Each of Richard Hellman's works deserves its own considered attention. While a theme emerges after the fact, unlike the others in the show, each of his pieces is separate visually while it exhibits another process or a new manner of approach to his content. Cyclones, sun swirls, or waves in a stark section of landscape could be seen as representing a personal inner state of being. Meditations and celestial bodies are suggested and given expression through all black or primary colors that layer to create ethereal atmospheres. Even two fish in a bowl seem to embody a psychic state more human or otherworldly than aquatic due to the dense color of their world lit by its own sun.

Tonia Matthews is a printmaker for those who love fine drawing. Her focus on the simple theme of rock, paper and scissors, allows her the freedom to explore drawing for its own sake while achieving the velvety results, simultaneously dense and delicate, that only printmaking inks on a textured matrix can produce in quite this way. Scratches, tone of a metal plate, controlled/accidental effects of sugar lifts and aquatic processes, combine with masterful drypoint drawing to retain the energy of the artist's touch, resulting in works that elicit a visceral response by the viewer.

Caroline Thorington's beautiful lithographic washes round out the technical range that this show offers. Festive dancing figures, some with animal heads, and symbolic human/animal beings populate celestial worlds in Thorington's narratives. Astrology and the dreamworld provide content while split picture planes provide an effective means to achieve a sense of separate, although interrelated, reality. Color and figure/ground relationships shift at invisible walls as her characters spin throughout raucous and seemingly noisy, music-filled ceremonies.