Catherine Kumlin works with pen and ink, paint on canvas, monotypes and wood blocks, and mixed media constructions. She also builds books from the ground up. In 1979 she earned a BA from Lone Mountain College. Over the years she's taken many classes to pick up new techniques and new media, and in 1990 she apprenticed with California painter Jackie Kirk for a year.
"When I was a girl my family went camping and fishing every weekend. I hated fishing, and I got really, really bored on those trips. It was out of boredom that I began making drawings. I felt like I was in the drawing because drawing was a way of drinking in what I saw. I feel the landscape when I draw--there's an expansion in my chest, and I like watching my hand move when I draw. I like watching ink come out of the end of the pen."
Necessity--the constraints of traveling light--mothered the making of her first small drawings when she traveled overseas in the 80's. Rather than simply recording what she saw she used drawings as a way of encoding a whole set of personal contexts onto a small piece of paper. The drawings she makes when she travels remind her of why she was in a given place at a given time, of associations with her childhood, of what she was thinking and feeling as she executed the work.
Moving from one medium to another helps Kumlin keep her work fresh. She began making monotypes two years ago.
"Images from my drawings recur in the monotypes but now they're wet and inky, where my drawings are dry and more controlled. With monotypes I keep building up the surface, layer by layer, and taking things away at the same time, exposing earlier layers. I'm still drawing, but the process is faster and looser, and there's a freedom in the speed of it. I might wipe the whole plate clean and start over. I have to be in the moment, attuned to myself and my image, to know when to stop working the plate and move to the press to make a print."
"I might print the plate and then print the ghost of the plate--running the plate through the press a second time without adding more ink. Sometimes the ghost is more interesting than the print I thought I was making. With monotypes what's on the plate is different from the print--it's reversed, and accidents happen, and the print is always a surprise, or a series of surprises."
March 27th Tue. --- April 1st Sun., 2007
Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, Annex.
The 5th KIWA Exhibition was the biggest one yet; 225 artists from 37 countries sent 550 prints. 10 prize winners were selected and three Honerable Mention Prizes were given. The poster left is by Romanian artist Atena-Elena Simiouescu.
