This piece is the almost serendipitous product of circumstances. At the time, I was doing a lot of drawing from the model. One day, I decided that my model should wear some animal paper masks; a series of nudes with animal masks was born. I did drawings, monotypes, and etchings based on these. The whole series was called “ Chronicles” and “ Garden of Earthly Delights Revisited” in honor of Hieronymous Bosch and his amazing fantastic creatures who inhabit a world where good and evil is interchangeable.

I trained with printmakers in my native Argentina as well as The Hague, Paris and the U.S. and use both the wide range of traditional printmaking techniques, from etching to lithograph, collagraph and chine colle, to experimental digital and video work. I believe that my Argentine and European background permeates my work; I aim to combine a sensuous line with bold and symbolic imagery, bringing the light and dark side of life together.

As with many of my prints, I used a combination of techniques to make Moonlit Traveler, in this case, etching and aquatint. In etching, a drawing is made with a sharp etching needle on a metal plate that has been previously covered with an acid-resistant coating. The plate is then submerged in acid, which bites through the drawn image but leaves the remainder of the treated surface untouched. After it is washed, the plate is ready to be inked and printed. Aquatint is a method that allows for larger surfaces of the plate to be “bitten” by exposing the plate to acid through layers of resin particles. (These explanations may begin to suggest to you why printmakers are so often seduced by technique.)

When the plate is ready, I applied the colors in stages. I used black etching ink for the line drawing and the aquatinted areas. I wiped the ink away in all but the lines and areas I wanted to be black. Then with a roller previously coated with blue and yellow etching ink I carefully rolled over the whole plate. I then placed a damp sheet of paper on top of the plate and ran it through the press, transferring the image onto the paper, and voilá, a print is born!

Thank you to the artist for making this print available to Bourgeon contributors. To acquire the work, click here.

Helga Thomson was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and studied there with German artist W. Dohme and printmakers Pompeyo and Eduardo Audivert. In Europe, she continued printmaking for brief periods in The Hague (Royal School of Art) and Paris (Atelier E. Caporaso and Jean Lodge). In the United States, Helga attended Ann Zahn’s Printmaking Workshop in Bethesda, Maryland, as well as Montgomery College, Maryland (with Z. Sikora), and the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, DC (with Gene Frederick and W. Christenberry, and digital art with Marise Riddell and Marte Newcomb). Helga has exhibited in international juried, group and solo shows. Her works are included in private and public collections (such as the Library of Congress) in the United States, Argentina, Europe and Central Asia. Helga has received national and regional awards in the United States. Helga is a member of the Maryland Printmakers, American Print Alliance, The Print Center of Philadelphia, Washington Project for the Arts/Corcoran, Arlington Arts Center, Pyramid Atlantic and the Central Asia Cultural Exchange. To see more, visit the artist’s website.

Edited by Ellyn Weiss

My work is still informed by my undergraduate studies and my experiences as a community organizer, now reinforced by the performance art of the 70’s (particularly feminist artists Suzanne Lacy and Eleanor Antin.)  As an artist and activist, through my works on paper, my installations, and artist books, I explore the power of the female figure and voice to express aspects of identity, while affirming the connections between art and society.

Until ten years ago, I worked primarily in community and commissioned public art, displaying life-sized woodcut rubbings of individuals and groups in locations relevant to the subjects. Now, continuing to embrace Method Acting’s belief in the constant dynamism of one’s inner and outer life, I draw to express through body language and clothing what each of my female subjects has brought to a moment in time. Wetting and fitting handmade paper to the subject, I create life-sized, softly cast 3-D drawings that references the figure without disclosing identity. Attached to lighted silhouette backgrounds, these shaped clothing pieces, with audio accompaniments, are intended as mirrors into one’s self and as conveyors of our shared humanity.

The first two installations of the series were Where I Live and What Matters.  Where I Live referred simultaneously to the site of the exhibition, to the location of each person’s identity, and to the source of my own creative exploration. What Matters continued my exploration of creative voice in both personal and political contexts by incorporating audio for the first time. These series allow me to continue to combine my love of drawing with my passionate interest in issues of identity. They also allow me to integrate lessons from community organizing, allowing me to engage larger social questions by hosting salons and evenings of conversation in my home studio as part of the work’s display.

Perfect Girls, the next installation in the series, opens in April 2011 and continues the use of my own self–reflection as the catalyst for creating work within a larger cultural context. This time, I will consider the “perfect girl” as a paradigm of our society. Drawings of my own coming of age in the 1950s and those of a 16 year old girl whom I have drawn at ages 5, 8, 13, and 16 (Naomi) will be displayed with audio collected from “Conversation Dinners” I hosted, and from Naomi herself, who has kept an audio journal.

Continental Drift will complete the series by considering identity through the cultures of other countries and the drifting influence between these cultures and the United States.  I began work on this project by traveling to Brazil in January 2010, where I photographed details from sidewalks, toys, products, netting, foliage, clothing and detritus.  I will travel to China and to Ghana to collect visual textures from those continents and these particular countries whose people have immigrated in large numbers to the US. These images will influence large color pencil drawings inspired by each country’s textures, and will allow me to work with women who have emigrated here.  Continental Drift is scheduled for exhibition at American University Museum at the Katzen Center in late 2012 or early 2013.

Looking back, I realize that the threads that launched me from adolescence – community organizing, theatre, visual arts and feminism have stayed as my constants.  Looking forward, I welcome their continued impact on my artistic growth and creative evolution.  And I realize I keep a pretty clean house.

Judy Byron studied theatre at Ithaca College and art at the Corcoran School of Art and Design. Her work on paper has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her permanent public works hang at sites including the School of Social Work in the Tate Turner Kuralt Building at UNC Chapel Hill, Service Employees International Union and the Urban Institute.

Byron’s solo exhibitions include “Artists + Communities” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She has participated in many group exhibitions, such as “Picturing Politics”, “Art Against AIDS”, and  “Sweet Sixteen”. Byron’s work is part of the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth Sackler Center Feminist Artist Base. Collections include the Corcoran Museum, the NMWA, the Library of Congress, Rutgers University, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Columbia and Absolut Vodka. She is included in 100 DC Artists edited by Lenny Campello(Schiffer June 2011).

Byron founded CAMP, an Artist Mentorship Program for the Corcoran Museum of Art, which was honored as a national model by the NEA and the President’s Commission on Arts and Humanities. She will complete her clothing series with “Perfect Girls” followed by “Continental Drift”.

Edited by Ellyn Weiss

Last winter, when DC was buried under several feet of snow, I decided to finally make a move into online art sales, opening up a shop on Makers Market, a juried online marketplace with a scientific bent.  The cell pieces were instantly my most popular, so I’ve been making more and more cell images.  I’ve been showing my work, mainly at art festivals around DC, for about 10 years.  Selling online connected me to a whole new audience and provided a creative shot in the arm. A bunch of biologists bought my work, and some of them suggested new subjects, like bacteria or blood cells.  One buyer pointed me toward “brainbows” – a series of images of mouse brain cells dyed in bright colors.  I loved them, and the images inspired me to begin painting brain cells.

I was talking about this new work with an artist friend, Sean Hennessey, who mentioned that he was having a show of his work at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and suggested that my cell paintings would be a good fit. The curator at NIH agreed, so I started to conceptualize this show. I decided that a whole show of mitosis paintings would be a little boring, and I wanted the exhibit to have a stronger theme.

I got to thinking about how activity at the cellular level underlies major upheavals in our lives, like falling in love, giving birth and dying.  I decided to divide my paintings into two groups – love and death.  It’s a kind of ridiculously grandiose theme, but I’m a lover of opera and Russian literature, and heck, go big or go home, right?

I learned a whole lot of anatomy and biology while painting these pictures.  I looked up microscopic photographs in books and on the web and did many practice paintings, trying to get the balance right between accuracy and artistry.  The “love” paintings focus on the cells that are involved in attraction and desire – the skin, eyes, and ears, the brain and the circulatory system.  I’m very proud of my blood vessels, especially my abdominal aorta.  (That’s not technically a cell, but ok, too bad.)

For the “death” paintings, I depicted three microscopic killers – bacteria, viruses and cancer.  The cancer piece really hit home, because I lost both my parents to pancreatic cancer over the last decade, and I had never really approached it in my art before.  And I included two mitosis paintings, because cell division underlies the whole process of life and death.

I’m really happy with the work I’ve put together for this exhibit, and I feel like it’s opened new doors for me creatively. The exhibit opens January 14^th and will be up through March 5, 2011 at the NIH Clinical Center West Gallery (10 Center Drive, Bethesda MD 20892.) For more info about getting to NIH, see: http://www.nih.gov/about/visitor/index.htm

Michele Banks is a self-taught artist based in Washington, DC.   She stayed in school for 20 years, picking up degrees in non-art-related subjects from GW and Harvard.  Michele then set out for Europe, spending five years as a management consultant in the UK and Russia.  After getting married, moving to Bermuda, and having a baby, she came back to DC and started to paint.  Michele has been showing her work locally since 2001 at galleries and festivals in the DC area.  She has served on the steering committee and the board of Artomatic, and her work is in the DC government’s Wilson Building Collection and the permanent collection of Children’s National Medical Center.  Michele lives and paints in an apartment in DC that she shares with her husband, daughter and cat. She sells her work online at artologica.etsy.com.  You can follow her on Twitter @Artologica.

“With the exhibition Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg closing on January 2nd, we wanted to share some of the comments visitors have shared with us, both online as well as in notebooks in the gallery at American Art.

The comments have enabled us to hear back from viewers, making the experience a two-way street. As you might have expected, Rockwell struck a chord with many visitors who found themselves drawn into his images and world, and perhaps sharing a Rockwell moment of their own.

People from around the country and around the world contributed comments. The exhibition seemed to bring the generations together, as one visitor commented: “I grew up with ‘Saturday Evening Post’ covers. My son grew up with Star Wars. Showing him these covers helps connect us further. Thanks for the memories.” Here are a handful more:

‘Thank you to George & Steven for sharing your wonderful collections with all of us. It’s a beautiful vision and gives us a joy to see.’

‘Rarely have I ever been to an exhibit where there was so much interaction between the viewers—people making comments to strangers, laughing, smiling at one another. That is what makes Rockwell such an important artist.’

‘I served in Iraq and will soon go to Afghanistan. If other nations had their own Rockwell we would have more friends in the world and fewer enemies and wars.’

‘I have more of a sense of American history and American spirit after seeing these pictures than after all the monuments combined.’

‘I was born in Colombia, South America and learned about the USA reading Saturday Evening Post which my dad received after living in NYC from 1919 till 1927. My dream was to move to the USA! I made that dream a reality when I came in 1966…Norman Rockwell showed to me the beauty and wisdom of this privileged land of opportunity. My three sons and eight grandchildren owe a great deal to SEP and Norman Rockwell.’ “

Click here to read the complete post. To learn more about the Rockwell exhibit, visit its webpage here.

Image in the post is Rockwell’s Boy and Father: Homework, from the Eye Level post.

“I wanted to share something very personal to me. our art collection. not pictures or anything, but the artists that we collect. My wife Rania and I have, over the last few years, been trying to collect works of DC area artists. We’re pretty committed to promoting and supporting local art and we have a lot of great friends that happen to be great artists.

Place and community are important to us. We also want to shape our collection into something very personal and a narrative of sorts or our life, people and things that we want to be close to. Our collection is one venue and outlet for our creativity. I’ve talked to a number of people recently that want to collect DC art but were uncertain where to begin.

I hope this helps those people… as well as just serving as a list for me to remind myself to buy art. Plus, you know.. if any of you want to buy us gifts (our birthdays are both in february). And yes, its 100% subjective. And no, I mean no offense if you are not on this list.

So far, we’ve managed to get works by these wonderful artists:

Novie Trump-
I knew Novie a looong loong time ago, well before either of us knew of one another as artists. I was taking a year off of college, she was working at a punk rock pizza joint where a roommate of mine worked. We were acquaintances, but not really friends. I re-met her at a lecture at the Arlington Art Center and she showed me some of her work. I fell in love with it. Plus Novie is a great woman. I got to know Novie better as we were both on the board of the Washington Sculptors Group for a spell and we are now studio neighbors out in Mount Rainier. I can’t get enough of her work and if rich enough would get her to design an entire room. I deeply hope that I can actually work with her on projects in the future.

Andrea Haffner-
I first saw Andrea’s work at Artomatic back in 2002. Stunning pieces and I’ve been buying jewelry from her for years. Her studio was nearby our house and before she took a sabatical from DC we bought a small piece of hers. we need a larger piece i’m afraid. it’s unique and beautiful. natural and synthetic. delicate and indestructible. I dont know a soul that doesn’t love her work.

Michael Janis-
Once michael started working in his now renowned scraffito technique i really wanted a piece of his. I’ve managed to pick up a few of his pieces at the Washington Glass School open studios. I’d really love to buy a large panel of his works, especially his more architecturally oriented pieces. he should be an art megastar. His work is that compelling.

Tim Tate-
I met and became good friends with Tim at the 2002 Artomatic. I had gone a bit over the top with a painting installation at that artomatic and was fortunate to have tim fall in love with my work. I was able to barter with tim to get some cool pieces of his. nothing like his newer pieces… which i covet. Even though he is mostly known, these days anyway, for his self contained video installations, my favorite pieces of his are complicated and narrative arrays of found objects with cast and blown glass. series such as the 7 deadly sins. But then again, maybe if ya’ll would stop buying his work, his prices would go down and i could afford it. ; ) Tim is one of the founders of the Washington Glass School, a MUST SEE studio for every art lover and collector in the dc area.”

Click here to read the complete post, including more profiles of exemplary DC artists and descriptions of their work.

Image in the post is Novie Trump’s White Woods.

“DC Sketcher’s is a new feature of East City Art written by contributor Kent Gay who teaches a new class at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop called DC Sketchers. Over the course of the next few weeks, DC Sketchers will record the places, people and happenings of the DC area.

DC Sketchers visited the National Gallery of Art on Saturday, December 11. We began by creating blind contour drawings of Winter (After Arcimboldo) (2010), a colossal 15-foot-tall, fiberglass sculpture by American artist and filmmaker Philip Haas (b. 1954). It is inspired by Arcimboldo’s painting Winter (1563), on view in an exhibit in the East Building. The sculpture is a great subject for blind contour, with a rich surface of organic textures and edges…. “

Click here to read the rest of the post.