01 March 2010

Karen Kunc Visits New England

Nebraska woodcut artist extraordinaire Karen Kunc (www.karen-kunc.com) was in Massachusetts this week. After a visit to Wheaton College in Norton where she had a show, she came to my town and gave a demonstration at Zea Mays Printmaking. The photo on the left by Tracy Ducasse is Karen at Zea Mays. (That's me behind her in the black knit hat.) You can see more of Tracy's great photos of the day on her Flickr site.

The demonstration was short but wonderful. Although Karen uses oil based litho inks rather than the waterbased inks of moku hanga, I learned a great deal from watching her and I can feel all the information rolling around inside me. I have a feeling that a few months from now I'm going to look back and see this encounter as having had a big influence on me.

One of the things that delighted me the most was that Karen is as lovely and vivid as her work. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting her and watching her print. If you'd like to see a sample of her in action, there are some videos posted on the Baren Forum blog of a demo Karen did at Sev Shoon Arts Center in Seattle.

4 comments:

Melody Knight Leary said...

Thanks for the photos Annie and happy to hear that you enjoyed the demo. You are so right about Karen being a nice person; easy to talk to and so willing to share. I too left with ideas rattling around in my head and was thinking that this summer might be a great time to revisit relief printing when I'm away from my press. It was interesting to find out that Karen uses litho inks for her wood blocks. She told me that she hadn't tried the waterbased inks because it would mean learning the idiosyncrasies of a new ink and she was pleased with the performance of the oil based inks. (This I understand because switching over to the Akua inks did require a new mindset.)

Also, it was interesting to see the progression of the print Karen had worked on at Wheaton.

betsy best-spadaro said...

I had the great fortune of taking a workshop with Karen last summer. She is truly an extraordinary printmaker!

Leslie Moore said...

Darn! I was in Northhampton for a poetry reading at Forbes Library that weekend. I would have loved to have seen the demonstration! Thanks for posting the links!

Diana said...

Hi Annie,
I also mentioned Karen's demo at ZM on my blog, Funky Delights. Link below, thanks!

http://funkydelights.blogspot.com/2010/03/karen-kunc-demo-at-zea-mays.html