The Image Flow is proud to announce their invitational exhibition Art Served on Plates: Intaglio Prints by Bay Area Fine Art Photographers & Artists.
This exhibition showcases a diverse group of talented artists who specialize in photogravure prints, a unique copperplate technique which combines photography and printmaking. Through this exhibition, you’ll have a chance to appreciate the luminous, velvety, and texture-rich imagery that can be produced with photogravure. The show features eight exceptional contemporary photogravure artists who work with this rigorous process, demonstrating the ample scope of this fascinating historic practice.
Intaglio is not the name of a pasta dish. It’s a 15th century fine art printing process. Today’s master printmakers use plates made of copper or aluminum alloy. One side of the plate is plain and boring. But if you hold the etched side up to the light, you’ll see a faint image. The artist etched or scribed that image into the surface.
Then it gets messy. The etched surface is frosted with thick ink. Most of that ink is wiped away. Now what? Set the plate face-up on the printmaking press along with a single damp sheet of paper. Thousands of pounds of pressure transfer the ink from the plate to the sheet. And with that, the Intaglio print is ready to dry.
Ed Carey is a Novato resident who has been active in the photo community for over forty years as a commercial photographer, gallerist, and black and white printer. His current work utilizes a number of 19th century photographic processes such as platinum/palladium, photogravure, and cyanotype.
Rory Earnshaw was born in London, and started taking photographs as a boy in rural Scotland.
Photography since then has been a way to see extraordinary things in everyday objects and places. After twenty five years as a commercial photographer he still makes time to work on the black and white images that inspire him so much.
Rory’s intimate prints explore the quiet, minimalist beauty of the landscape. Shooting only with film and often with a large-format camera, he takes advantage of the slow and deliberate process of classic silver gelatin darkroom printing and toning. Rory’s photography has been featured in a number of exhibitions including solo shows at the San Francisco MoMA Artist’s Gallery for his body of work, Contact 49, and Spectrums of Solitude at The Image Flow.
Our lives are monotonous yet messy, sumptuous and despicable at times. And there are moments of bliss that seem to overwhelm our fears. All this brings me to the easel.
Personal experience tells me that the mind guards the heart with precision, analysis or indifference. Therefore, I render human drama as abstractions. Much like dream images, these implications of human behavior deny clear thinking and leaven the soul’s daemon. Hundreds of drawings depict my sense of this ongoing drama.
My brother and I were parented by an artist and part-time writer. Born in San Francisco and raised in what was once Santa Clara Valley, I watched apricot orchards and shaded creeks give way to a national defense industry that became Silicon Valley.
I struggled in school yet succeeded in advertising as a creative. Since 1980 I have produced tens of thousands of two-minute sketches in search of solutions for clients in need of print advertisements, branding and packaging. Now I bring this imaginative calisthenic to the easel.
Forty-three years later, graphic images no longer captivate me. What survives is my fascination with human drama, combined with gnawing ignorance. I will not stop exploring and revealing these unseen and eternally vague human forces refracted through my mythic lens.
Bittersweet (Copperplate Photogravure)
I am in a bittersweet time of life. My parents are in their last chapter, and I will be mourning the loss of them soon. At the same time, my children are creating new families of their own that includes a new chapter of grand-parenting joy for me. I am using flowers as a metaphor for this time as they too have a bittersweet nature. In fresh bloom they are brilliant and uplifting, and
as they decay, they have another kind of beauty. I am pairing unique objects or vessels with flowers both fresh and in decline for this flower study. My intention is to observe the beauty in the beginning and the ending of life.Timepiece (Copperplate Photogravure)
An instrument to measure the progress of time, a piece of jewelry, a status symbol: the timepiece of bygone days. This project started over 10 years ago, about the moment I set aside my own wristwatch for the more contemporary way to view time, on my phone. I became curious about these once prized timepieces that were suddenly showing up by the box full at flea markets. My intention was not focused on how humans look at time, but rather about the beauty of the object itself.These are current and ongoing projects, 2022.
Barbara Hazen is a 3rd generation Californian. Her work explores the internal self and the intersection of memory and the family scrapbook, with an emphasis on cyanotype and platinum palladium processes. She received a BS from UCSB in Anthropology and later attended the California Culinary Academy. She worked for most of the next decade in several acclaimed restaurants as the assistant and head pastry chef. After a career in the culinary industry. Hazen returned to her photographic practice. Her work has been featured in numerous publications including PDN, Critical Mass, and B&W Magazine and exhibited in group and solo exhibits including Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, LightBox Gallery in Astoria, OR, The Image Flow in Mill Valley, CA, Focus Gallery in San Francisco, CA, APA in San Francisco, CA and at The Art of Photography in San Diego, CA. She lives and works in Marin County, CA.
As a visual storyteller, Christy McDonald uses documentary and street photography to engage with the people and places she explores. With a natural propensity to wander, she observes the details of daily life, seeking images of unexpected beauty that reveal the varied aspects of humanity and the spirit of a place.
Based in Berkeley, California, she has a B.A. in Fine Art Photography from UC Berkeley and is a member of the Rolls and Tubes Photographic Collective which recently launched a self-published book (that sold out in 24 hours) and exhibited at Chung24 Gallery in San Francisco. Rolls and Tubes Photographic Collective exhibition is touring, and will move on to The Griffin Museum of Photography, Massachusetts opening in June 2023.
The San Francisco Photogravure series takes the viewer on a drive through San Francisco’s hills, exploring the streets, houses, and cars that wind around them. Several of the prints feature the moody San Francisco fog.
The prints are made with solarplates, a nontoxic alternative to acid-based photoetching. They are hand inked with multiple colors on a single plate. Photogravure #4 adds precise and detailed color variations using chine collé, small pieces of colored paper; also, #4 is printed from two plates, allowing it to be twice the usual maximum size of a solarplate etching.
Meredith Moles is a visual artist interested in space, perception, and location. Her work includes paintings in gouache and casein, urban sketches in ink and watercolor, and solarplate photogravures. Her stairway paintings celebrate the San Francisco Bay Area’s urban stairways, and consider how to express the perceived, four-dimensional environment on a two-dimensional surface. Much of Meredith’s work explores the joys of life in the San Francisco Bay Area, with its hills, parks, coffee shops, breweries, and quirky/charming/gritty/fascinating neighborhoods. A sense of playfulness and fun runs through her work.
Mark Nelson is a fine art photographer and printmaker hailing from Elgin, Illinois who works in photopolymer gravure and platinum-palladium printmaking proceses. He started his photographic career at age 50, and is a self-taught photographer who has never taken a course (although he has taught a number of workshops, including gravure and platinum-palladium printing at The Image Flow).
Mark is the author of Precision Digital Negatives for Silver and Other Alternative Photographic Processes. He has taught his method of printing with digital negatives and positives to hundreds of studious photographers and printmakers throughout the United States, and to many foreign travelers visiting specifically for his instruction. You can find more information about this book and his workshops at precisiondigitalnegatives.com.
In the last few years I have been refining my vision about landscape through images that are tangible and vague at the same time. I am interestedin work that transcends the actual place and leads the spectator into a mythic realm. Nature does have a way to express its thoughts through shapes and light, and my goal is to convey a timeless atmosphere, an inner landscape that inhabits the human experience. I aspire to give a dreamlike attention to the things occurring in the landscape, making a monument of the ephemeral. The influences of writers such as Thoreau in his book Walking and Looking at how landscape has been interpreted in painting, for example in Greco’s skies, left a mark on my work and on how scenery is recreated through the human mind.
— Unai San Martin, Nostos exhibition catalog, 2022
Unai San Martin is a Spanish artist living in the San Francisco Bay Area who is best known for his award-winning gravure prints. He has exhibited at the International Biennial Fair in Ljubljana, the Cameron Gallery in San Francisco, Foto España, Kln Art Fair, The AIPAD Photography Show, and SF MoMA. His work is represented in museums and collections throughout the United States and Spain. In 2002 he won the National Award for Printmaking in Spain for the best work by Figure. Previously, he won First Prize for Engraving at Gure Artea (1991), Kala Art Institute Berkeley artist residency scholarship (1997), and Honorable Mention at the National Engraving and Graphic Art Award (2001).
