Hot off the Press
Janine Wong
Recto Verso duotypes
Center Street Studio is pleased to announce the publication of Janine Wong’s duotypes, Recto Verso.
from the artist:
In this color poem series, I explore color using a unique printing process I developed that produces two prints simultaneously from a double-sided printing plate. Plates are constructed with paper coated on both sides with ink, cut into strips of varying widths and lengths and woven into a geometric composition. The color strips on the front side are woven in search of a balanced and unified composition. It’s only when its printed, the back side is revealed.
Each a pair of prints is a duality: order and chance, chaos and control, conventions and invention. Each pair represents impressions from both sides of the same plate. One side of the plate is a harmonious interplay of colors, carefully composed through the lens of color theory and the dynamics of color interaction. The other side unfolds as a serendipitous result—a chance composition that embraces the dual nature of artistic creation: the intentional and the spontaneous.
Recto Verso featured at Merge, Stone Ridge, NY for the Alchemy of Color exhibition
Merge is delighted to bring together the magnificent and vibrant work of three artists, Eva Lundsager, Patricia Sonnino, and Janine Wong. The exhibition coalesces their work into a bountiful confluence of color, a rapturous celebration of hue. Chromatic parallels in their art work are juxtaposed, bound and stitched together, blended and merged, affecting an enchanting and magical transformation. Each artist’s work captures transitory and elusive moments through the media of oil, watercolor, and printmaking. To elucidate the inspirations and methodologies of each artist, this exhibition will exhibit each artist’s processes in a dedicated gallery.
The exhibition setting offers a tableau, an agrarian compound of barns that themselves embody past and shared cultural memory, archaeological fragments cueing technological shifts, traces of lives past, embedded within its wizened patina of its wood, metal, and stone materiality. This framework offers the artwork to converge and engage within these spaces and outside of them, in contrast to a neutral white box which forefronts art works as autonomous objects faceted by a frame. This additional layering, a forum of multifaceted space and light as canvas, invites additional juxtapositions, relationships, and spatial intersections.
This phenomenal triumvirate of artwork , an orchestration of color, moves beyond the frame, triggering our sentiment and memories, offering lasting impressions, each artist’s work resonating and enrapturing the viewer.
Find out more about upcoming exhibitions at Merge, Stone Ridge at their website.
George Whitman
untitled (beetle 1-4)
Known for his meticulously drawn works describing a fantastical view of nature, where flora and fauna exist in a dream-like landscape, George Whitman has published prints with Center Street Studio since 1998. Beginning with his ten year project ‘Untitled,’ a portfolio of ten etchings depicting a miscellany of animals, from a boar, to a rooster, to a crocodile, Whitman continues on with large scale plates filled with fantastic landscapes. One of his recent etchings, ‘Tucker,’ is a loving portrait of his friends’ 250 lb pet pig that lives with them in their home. This suite of exquisitely drawn beetles in stipple and line, follows another suite of insect prints of butterflies from 2016 as well as a large etching of a dragonfly from 2020. Check out all of George Whitman's prints on our website: www.centerstreetstudio.com.
Anna Schuleit Haber
Sliding down the Banister
Center Street Studio is pleased to announce a new suite of four etchings by German-American artist Anna Schuleit Haber. Master printer and publisher James Stroud invited the artist to pursue a print project after seeing a series of drawings she was working on over the course of the past few years. Four motifs chosen from a larger group were newly drawn and etched into copper plates. Printed on Hahnemühle Copperplate paper with hand-colored chine collé sheets painted by the artist in acrylic, each set in the 'edition' of 30 will be unique. The first available set is featured here.
The price is $6500. for the set of four prints. For more information and availability please contact Director James Stroud: jstroud@centerstreetstudio.com or click the Purchase button below.
from the artist:
My usual studio space has several parts: paintings on the walls, drawings and prints on tables in the middle, paints and inks and dry media and other tools in-between, and books and writings on the fringes. The different parts in my studio help to keep me moving, like stations along a road. Things are in flux, swinging in and out of abstraction. I feel curious and glad in the spaces that open up in that imagined landscape, glad to follow, to find. At the center of it all — not in the center visibly, but rather central to the daily work — lie my drawings. Sometimes drawings are a way of story-making. Sometimes they remain figurative enough to be recognized as something known or remembered. Sometimes they become a form of recording.
In the printmaking studio the open ways of drawing merge for me with the linear processes of printing. Three of the etchings are of wooden figures that I found while helping to clear an old attic space. The birds, the hinged dog, and the horse emerged from the half-dark with their shapes and characters intact. The fourth etching is of my dog, who belongs with the others, bridging their world of open play with ours. Among the layers of inspiration for this project are also the life stories of toy creator Margarete Steiff and pediatrician Janusz Korczak. The notions of how to be and how to invent — of how to be in one’s inventions, and how to survive through them — are all tied into this series.
Anna Schuleit Haber, September 2023
Anna Schuleit Haber’s work lies at the intersection of painting, drawing, performance and installation art, architecture, and community. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard. Her works range from museum installations made with paint, to large-scale projects in forests, on uninhabited islands, and in psychiatric institutions, using extensive sound systems, live sod, thousands of flowers, mirrors, antique telephones, bodies of water, and neuroscience technologies. She was named a MacArthur Fellow for a body of work that has “conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty." Her works on paper and paintings are included in private collections throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Markus Linnenbrink
THESECONDHEARTONFIRE
Center Street Studio is pleased to announce its first print project of 2023 with German born artist Markus Linnenbrink. Markus pushed our technical limits to the max during this past residency producing monotypes larger than we have ever made before at CSS. The result was a series of five 60 x 60 inch prints literally dripping with ink. Please contact Director James Stroud for availability and pricing. jstroud@centerstreetstudio.com.
Bill Thompson
Inkwell
Center Street Studio is pleased to announce its first print publication of 2023. This is Bill Thompson's first print with CSS since 2015!
From the artist:
‘As a sculptor, I tend to view everything in terms of volume and form. With two-dimensional work, I look for a way to address the physicality of the paper itself or graphically convey volume and form. For our latest etching, I wanted to revisit the vessel form of an earlier print, Relaxed Standard. Because a vessel generally holds liquid and as a nod to the printmaking medium, it was logical to imagine it filled with black ink. The title worked because of the wordplay—an implied directive to the printer—and as an echo of my youth growing up in a house full of antiques.
After the vessel plate was created, we experimented with various ways to incorporate texture into the negative space. Initially, we considered filling the background with a scan of a vintage yellowed newspaper; but I decided that it would be more conceptually accurate if the words had been generated by a quill pen. In my family’s trove of genealogical documents, I found two books containing sermons handwritten in the mid-1800’s by my great-great-grandfather, a Presbyterian minister. We scanned and doubled them up to create a denser background texture—one in which the words were still somewhat legible but not distractingly so. My mother, especially, would have been thrilled by this ancestral collaboration and rather amused that her secular son had finally embraced words delivered from a church lectern!’
- Bill Thompson, January 2023
Laurel Sparks
Book of Days
Center Street Studio is pleased to announce a new watercolor monotype series from Laurel Sparks. See all 27 of her new works on her artist’s page.
The Book of Days series of watercolor monotypes applies geometric patterns as a form of cryptography using invisible systems of colored points and paths. Most of the print patterns are determined by the numerology of their creation date. The colors and points are informed by esoteric correspondence tables from the Renaissance, while the weaving of lines encrypts the elemental glyph of the day. The systems are not meant to be decoded, but experienced as a transmission of abstract resonances. Additionally, glitches and irregularities spotlight moments in the pattern when repetition gives way to novelty and imperfection. Thus, mathematics and time provide an invisible structure for chromatic entanglements to yield unexpected rhythms.
- Laurel Sparks, August 2021
Markus Linnenbrink
ALLEYESABLAZETHEDAYYOUBREAKYOURMOULD
After completing his most recent room-sized installation at the Museum of New Art in Portsmouth, NH, Markus Linnenbrink stopped by the shop for a summer session on the presses at CSS. Linnenbrink’s newest prints, ALLEYESABLAZETHEYDAYYOUBREAKYOUR, is a series of 21 monotypes that complement his previous watercolor monotype project with CSS, ASALLTHINGSMUSTSURELYHAVETOEND (2021).
George Whitman
untitled (chimp and croc)
Known for his meticulously drawn works describing a fantastical view of nature, where flora and fauna exist in a dream-like landscape, George Whitman has published prints with Center Street Studio since 1998. Beginning with his ten year project ‘Untitled,’ a portfolio of ten etchings depicting a miscellany of animals, from a boar, to a rooster, to a crocodile, Whitman continues on with large scale plates filled with fantastic landscapes. One of his recent etchings, ‘Tucker,’ is a loving portrait of his friends’ 250 lb. pet pig that lives with them in their home. Check out more of George's prints below on his CSS artist page.