One Day Only!

Prints, drawings and paintings
by Julianna Kirwin and Andrew Fearnside
at Julianna Kirwin Studio Gallery
8th & Mountain

Saturday 12/2 10-4.

Join us for a celebration of art and community!

* * * * *

A DIALOGUE ABOUT ART AND LIFE IN ABQ:

Andrew: What do you love about the Abq art scene?
Julianna: I’m so happy that our Burque art identity is very different from that of Santa Fe and Taos and I feel our geographic location near Mexico adds a rich dimension to our artistic traditions and expressions.

Julianna: How about you? What do you like best about Abq’s art scene?
Andrew: Albuquerque is a great place to grow as an artist. We are blessed with strong homegrown arts institutions like 516 Arts, Harwood and Keshet, and with dynamic and supportive arts departments at UNM and CNM. We have ready access to materials and innovative art production spaces like Matrix and Q Lab. We have more arts events per weekend than any sane human can fully enjoy. We have galleries that bring in the world-class work of mature artists–Richard Levy and Central Features–and we have a diverse cast of spaces that foster emerging artists. And yet Abq is small enough to make the cost of living affordable, dynamic enough to have all kinds of work for us, and beautiful enough to remind us all to just kick back and enjoy life once in a while.

Julianna: Who have been the influences on your print work?
Andrew: I grew up making art with my mom, who is a printmaker. I played with linocuts and screen prints with her early on. As a young person I spent a lot of time in my town’s library, drinking in images and stories like water. I learned about master designers, draftspeople and printmakers like Leonard Baskin, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast alongside the comix of masters like Jack Kirby. In art school I fell in love with Gustave Baumann, Kathe Kollwitz and Oscar Kokoschka. Through the internet I’ve learned about Australian printmaker Barbara Hanrahan, English illustrator Sarah Beetson, and Tarot design Neil Lovell–and hundreds more. Today I’m learning from local legends Kei & Molly, Mountain Road’s Julianna Kirwin, and our state’s incredible devotional art traditions. I’m perennially fascinated by the work of French designer Nathalie du Pasquier, and by the woodcuts of the unnamed medieval artisans who made folk images of all kinds of things.

Andrew: And you? Who are your influences?
Julianna: Right now, I love the work of Melanie Yazzie, a Native American printmaker who uses stencils to create her images. She teaches in Boulder and has had numerous exhibitions, including UNM.

Andrew: What’s this show about for you?
Julianna: For this show, I am exhibiting monoprints. It’s been really fun to explore the qualities of soy based inks and to return to a full use of color in my work. I loved doing color blends and landscapes again!

Julianna: Why do you make prints?
Andrew: For all kinds of reasons. I make prints because the action of feeling my gestures slowly and precisely is deeply engrossing, even meditative. Cutting a lino block I am practice my ability to focus with as much precision and emotional engagement as I can muster. I can feel the work stretching my capacity for this kind of compassionate connection to my world, and that is very gratifying. I make prints because I tend to think about the construction of images in flat layers anyhow, and because I feel most at home in the high-contrast world of “graphic” images.To a smaller degree, I make prints because people like me can’t often afford paintings. Abq doesn’t have as well-heeled a market for fine art as its northern neighbor, Santa Fe–and that’s fine.

Andrew and Julianna: See you tomorrow!

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