October in the Annex: Jane Cohen, Deborah Drummond and Barbara Corrigan
This October in the Annex Gallery we are featuring Barbara Corrigan, Jane Cohen, and Deborah Drummond. The artists invite us to experience worlds outside our own through printmaking, painting, and collage. Shapes and vibrant colors take us through representational and abstracted life experiences. It’s a show that focuses on the spaces in-between, as well as asking the viewer to open their eyes to reality, imagination, and process. Below the artists talk a bit about their work.
Barbara Corrigan
From Impact to Print
My ideas come from experiences that impact me emotionally, from the complex to the simplest, from the struggles for women to the internal structures of a flower.
“Jafina” is the example that I chose to show the germination of an idea for printmaking. I traveled to Kenya in the fall of 2017 with a small NGO dedicated to finding resources for a small village that struggles with drought. The six-to-eight hour process of water collection appears grueling from the outside. It is difficult to stomach the reality that until water scarcity is no longer an issue, the women who labor to collect it will have no opportunity to advance economically or explore recreational interests.
I began working on drawings as a basis for a triptych from photos that another volunteer sent to me, and from the black and white drawings came colored images. These served as templates for my monotypes. I used a subtractive method for the majority of the printing on three plates simultaneously. For the more detailed work on the bodies and clothing I made approximately twenty stencils, and the application was done by hand.
Jane Cohen
On Ideas:
My work is driven by a constant curiosity about places and the ways in which they connect or define me.
How do we fit in, what’s our place in the world? Is it where we grow up or some other location that we connect with on a deeper level? The individuality and uniqueness of a place affect my paintings; the quality of light, the color of the sky, and the textures of the land are all visual pieces of the puzzle.
Risk and uncertainty are my friends, and I try to keep the painting open to all possibilities–where its outcome is not yet known and anything can happen. Taking a wrong turn or unexpected direction is often more productive than getting things right, and getting lost can have surprising outcomes. Working back and forth between organic and architectural elements, patterns and textures, as well as colors and tangles of marks is the process that keeps me engaged and the sense of mystery alive and well.
On Process:
The soul of my work is drawn from personal memories and relationships and the feelings that they generate. My internal dialogue begins with the first mark on the surface, while the color sets the mood, the marks and shapes tell the story.
Painting is as much of a physical and mental process for me. Each step, beginning with reading and researching, choosing a surface, mixing new colors, searching for new tools and experimenting with new methods are as important as the application of paint and mark.
Deborah Drummond
My work as a fine artist follows an instinctual flow and is intentionally non-representative, perhaps a reflex away from my days as an illustrator and designer. My method and process in painting has always been in the abstract–drawing from the imagination.
Sketchbooks hold concepts drawn as subconsciously as I can, dividing the space on the page without any representational bent just shapes, movement, and color.
The past year, I started using gel plate mono-printing process on paper. The pieces may end up close to final but usually are built up with collage from other gel printed and custom painted papers.
Using this process, I feel less constrained to a particular method or media while building shapes, transparencies, and color relationships I find exciting–essentially making objects out of thoughts.