Summer Art Exhibitions Feature Guest Artist Annette Mitchell

Guest artist Annette Mitchell, printmaker and professor of art at Plymouth State University, will showcase new works including The Basin West (pictured here) at Colby-Sawyer College starting on June 8. — Guest artist Annette Mitchell, print-maker and professor of Art at Plymouth State University, will showcase new works including *The Basin West* (pictured here) at Colby-Sawyer College starting on June 8.

Published print-maker Annette Mitchell, professor of Art at Plymouth State University, will showcase her latest prints as guest artist in the Fine and Performing Arts summer art exhibition. Additional exhibition highlights include a collaborative suite of 96 small drawings created by Colby-Sawyer alumna Diane Stendahl ’80 and Colby-Sawyer Professor of Fine and Performing Arts, Loretta Barnett.

The exhibitions are open at the Marian Graves Mugar Art Gallery in the Sawyer Fine and Performing Arts Center and will run through Friday, August 30. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday from 9 AM to 5 PM. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, June 8 at 6 PM. Admission to the gallery and the opening reception is free and open to the public.

Mitchell’s series pays homage to the power and joy of the New England environment and illustrates a vivid blend of traditional Sumi painting techniques and contemporary polystyrene printing methods. “In the studio, I mentally revisit landscape elements that have highlighted my living in New Hampshire,” she says. “In retrospect, I remember what appears to be an armature of the grand outdoor experience – its linear momentum.”

Author of Foam is Where the Art is—New Ways to Print, Mitchell has created a novel printmaking process that uses polystyrene as a block printing medium. The technique has drawn attention, and American Artist Magazine published the article “Creating Elegant Prints from a Foam Plate” about her work.

Stendahl and Barnett’s collection of 96 drawings started out as two 48-piece stacks of blank paper in October of 2011. They worked on them together in Stendahl’s North Salem, N.Y. studio, and each artist reacted to the “surprise packages” they exchanged via mail.

“The first weekend in the studio allowed us to get marks on each piece of paper; we worked in our normal styles and conceptually we kept the process completely open,” the duo explains. “After the first session we left our works for the other to work on in solitude. Each time we exchanged the 48 pieces, we received the gift of surprise and amazement; then the work began, as we viewed, analyzed and then reacted to the other’s marks, ideas, colors and shapes, adding our own marks and vision to each new work … having a blast making art.”

The exhibit features additional works by Colby-Sawyer Fine and Performing Arts faculty, including ceramics by Professor and Chair of Fine and Performing Arts, Jon Keenan, and Associate Professor David Ernster; woodcut and monotype prints by Assistant Professor Mary Mead; graphic design promotional pieces and a set of plates by Assistant Professor Hilary Warlord; photography by Assistant Professor Nicholas Gaffney; and sculpture by Professor Loretta Barnett.