Showing in September at Davidson Galleries
Showing September 4-26, 2009
First Thursday reception: September 3, 6-8pm
Leslie Williams Cain
In the Foothills and Along the Bottoms,
Recent Works from the Walla Walla Valley
Winter Stubble, 2009. Pastel on paper. 16 x 54.
This exhibition of pastels on paper by Leslie Williams Cain features a body of work produced during the past year, a time of great personal transitions and upheavals for the artist. The images mark moments when she could pause and catch her breath. In these times of respite the artist sought the companionship and friendship that her home, the Walla Walla Valley, offers her. She found herself “walking its ridges with the wind, or standing ankle-deep in its streams,” and feeling the weight of life falling away. During these walks she recognized that movement is a constant, in nature and in one’s own life.
Cain’s pastels capture the shifting light on the land, the wind blowing in the grasses, and ripples moving on the water’s surface. The artist works and reworks her images, first sketching lines, then kneading the pigment into the surface to create broad planes of color. This process is repeated several times and completed with a bold overlay of line. Cain’s large scale works draw the viewer into the landscape, offering a moment to pause, reflect and lose oneself in the beauty of the fleeting moment.
View previous work by the artist.
Paula Barragan Mitad del Mundo
Mamey, 2004. Intaglio. 4-3/4 x 4-3/4. Ed. 50.
Mitad del Mundo (Middle of the Earth) is the first exhibition at Davidson Galleries of works by Equadorian artist Paula Barragan, and consists of over twenty intaglio prints made in the past ten years. The artist takes profound pleasure in the process of discovery that occurs while she is making art, whether it is drawing, painting or making prints. In her intaglio prints, Barragan creates rich, textured surfaces, reminiscent of woven textile patterns, using an open-bite process that deeply etches the plate. The translucency of the thin Japanese handmade paper that she prints on gives the work a luminous quality. Her images range from abstract patterns that one might see in nature, such as the swirl on a snail shell or the angular lines of an animal’s rib cage, to crude folk-like drawings of humans and creatures. Barragan feels that her images express life situations and stories, the lines and color reflect delight and misfortune in every moment.
Paula Barragan received her BFA at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. She also studied printmaking and painting in San Francisco and Paris. Barragan’s work has been exhibited throughout South America, Spain, Germany and New York. Her work can be found in the Museum of the Central Bank of Ecuador and in many private collections.
*Special reception and walk-through with Paula Barragan, sponsored by Seattle Print Arts and Sev Shoon Art Center as part of the Visiting Artist Program, September 3, 5 - 6 pm.
Trish Maharam Story Maps
Shapes of an Inner Landscape (detail), 2008.
Silk, cotton thread. 18 x 20 inches.
Seattle artist Trish Maharam hand-stitches cotton thread on layers of mostly transparent silk to create delicate, ethereal embroidered works that evoke topographical maps of fields and water. She describes this new body of work as Story Maps, which “represent a place as it is perceived by an individual or a by a culture moving through it. They are records of specific journeys, organized around the passage of the traveler, and their perimeters are the perimeters of the sight or experience of that traveler.” Maharam has been making art all her life. She has worked in a variety of mediums including writing, drawing, and most recently has focused on working with hand-stitching fabric. This is Maharam’s first exhibition at Davidson Galleries.