Pre-2000

My first foray into printmaking was in 1988 at St. Michael's Printshop in St. John's, where I studied etching and relief printmaking. I was immediately drawn to the physicality and directness of carving wood and linoleum. About this time, serendipitously, a friend who worked at an art-supply store persuaded me to purchase her entire inventory of deeply discounted lino-cutting materials and that began a printmaking trajectory that is still going strong.

Printmaking has now been a major part of my studio practice for more than 25 years. I work in both print and paint media, often simultaneously and sometimes within the same piece. The two media complement and influence each other in formal, technical, and conceptual ways that I find exciting and inspiring.

My earliest relief prints were line drawings whose subjects progressed from Classical Greek mythological figures to my own lares et penates (household gods). Many of these early prints depict interiors inhabited by plants and cats and still-life leitmotifs; they were created for the exhibition Outside and Inside. As that title suggests, they present images of both interior and exterior worlds, sometimes within the same print.

The landscape images came a little later, created for the exhibition Pastoral and Otherwise. These prints depict the barrens outside of St. John's, islands along the Southern Shore of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, the decorative patchwork-quilt pattern of fields in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, and views of my own garden.

This body of pre-2000 linocuts contains the seeds of later work; for example, the night images have since blossomed into the ongoing Landscape Dreaming series of prints and the Nocturne paintings.

A few prints from several of these early editions are still available. For further information or to inquire about purchasing a piece, please contact me.