at the West Wyandotte Library
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by Gesine Janzen
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| A place in my mind, materials, a memory, a feeling; these ingredients come together,
speak to each other, while I create an image. The place I choose to represent is usually
a place where I spent time as a child, my family's house, my grandparents' house, and places
in their vicinity. I often go back to summers in our house, the one my parents bought and
moved to the countryside in central Kansas. It needed a lot of fixing up, so we only spent
summers there for many years. The visceral qualities of the memories I have from those summers
keep drawing me back to that place where we worked and played, in the garden, in the heat,
in the sun, where we spent evenings on the screen porch, my father reading to us by lantern light.
This was where we scraped paint, snipped beans, drank lemonade, and played outside in the prairie The formal elements in my images come directly from these times and places. Colors are chosen to represent prickly heat or smooth coolness. Textures recall the surfaces of plaster, wood siding, nubby bedspreads, linoleum, gravel dust, rust, or musty old wallpaper. I often use printed patterns within these spaces, either to define a separate plane in the composition, or to simply imply the domestic side of life. During these summers I would go to my grandmother's house to learn how to sew, iron clothes, and bake bread. She also gave me art lessons, taught me about making rubbings with crayons, and she remains a major influence in my life and work. The male presence of my grandfather and father are usually represented by wooden structures such as scaffolding or tomato racks, often built with "two-by-fours." The first print I remember working on was a collaborate effort. My parents projected a slide of our house onto a piece of linoleum. My brother and sister and I traced the image, my father cut into the block, and we all helped with the printing of our 1976 Christmas card. The process of making something is key to my love of printmaking. The belief that a handmade object has inherent value, is an aesthetic passed on to me from my family. In making lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and drawings, I feel my time is well spent. I enjoy the process of working with raw materials, layering inks and colors, and grandfather's collection of prints in Germany as I was growing up must have instilled in me the value of prints, and of art in general. Creating an image from all of these influences is a process of moving, looking, and finding through time. Imagine exploring different levels in a large space, floating about, discovering different scenes on each plane, moving backward, forward, left, and right at will, all the while picking up separate scenes, bringing them along. By putting together various pictures picked up along these walks, I hope to bring together distinct feelings about a particular place. These feelings are not the feelings I had at the time I lived in this space, but rather the feelings I have as I recall, long for, and look back; the feelings created by memory of place. These are the feelings I get when I search for what the importance of that place is or was; the feeling of the place where my memory occurs. For more information on this or any other exhibit at the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library, call Sarah Bohndorf at (913) 596-5800, or email sbohnd@kckpl.lib.ks.us. |
