By Barbara Pfannkuch I like my work to be whimsical, not stuffy. Sometimes it deals with nature, sometimes our day to day lives. Recently I have been having fun creating images that coincide with a favorite quote. I enjoy adding splashes of color to an otherwise colorless medium. Print making allows me to have no inhibitions and not worry about making mistakes because I can always print more. But best of all I love the balance between creating art, being in nature and raising my family. I moved up to Duluth with my family to pursue the simple life, one that is closer to nature. My husband is an artisan as well, making hand crafted canoe paddles for Whiskeyjack Paddles. We couldn’t have found a better place to live, to follow our dreams and to raise our precocious 4 year old. I received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where I studied a variety of print making methods. Just recently I have begun to focus on block printing techniques. I have always enjoyed working in the negative and thinking in reverse and block printing provides this challenge. Each print comes from either a linoleum or wood block from which I carve the negative space. Any lines that are not carved appear on the print, while everything that is carved will be white, or rather negative space. Once carved, the block’s image is rolled with printing ink. A piece of paper is then placed on the block, rubbed first by hand and then with a Japanese brayer. The paper is carefully pulled away from the block and voila, the image is printed in reverse on the paper! Once I have a black and white image I like to hand paint each image with gouache or water color to give each print it’s own individual quality. This makes the series of prints similar to each other, but also unique. |