"It's only paper and ink"

An artist’s world turns inside out and backwards when they make a pilgrimage to a print studio to work with a master printmaker. In the last few years, painter Barbara Grad has been visiting master printmaker Catherine Kernan at Mixit Print Studio in Somerville to experiment with woodblock prints. I saw some last winter in the second iteration of The Long View: Women Artists in the Studio at Suffolk University Gallery.

Barbara and woodblocks seems like a perfect match. The painter’s muscular abstracted landscapes have a graphic vitality similar to that of a woodblock print. She uses line as a route and a gambit, often leading the eye into deep drops or wild twists. Her work breaks up our expectations of what a landscape is, offering something more present and energetic that won’t fit into a genre’s box.

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The prints she makes collaborating with Catherine read more intimately than her expansive paintings, as if the process of printmaking has compelled her to narrow her vision. The vigor remains. Seeing images of Barbara’s woodblocks and prints in her piece below, I sense hieroglyphs, as if these are treasure maps written in an ancient, forgotten language. The titles of two of prints, SEARCH and RESCUE, suggest a map is desperately needed.

Building space and shifting color, employing a variety of techniques, Barbara attains a complexity that echoes that in her paintings. Those canvases are inner landscapes as much as outer ones. What does it do when you invert the image, too?

Let’s find out. Barbara writes: