Landscape

Two of Kathleen Zimmerman's recent series use landscapes as a major part of their subject matter. Not landscapes in the traditional sense but landscapes none the less. Xtrasensory and Landscape series' play with ideas concerning both states of mind and the sense of place.

Kathleen's Xtrasensory Series is made up of three very different ways of using landscapes in Cloud Nine, Spirit Guide and Dreamscape.  

In Cloud Nine, a landscape of clouds allows the viewer to relax and let their minds wander as they glaze upward.

In Spirit Guide, the viewer is lead on a journey through the woods as they look for enlightenment.

While in Dreamscape, an invented interior/exterior landscape invites the viewer to enter a dreamworld.

Kathleen's Landscape Series is composed of two separate yet complementary works, Inner Landscape and Outer Landscape. Both deal with the notion of an interior life. 

Inner Landscape expresses the idea that every living being has a hidden interior life that remains private and unaccessible to the public. While it is fed from exterior "light", or life, and grows as we grow, it is the essence of what that being is and largely remains the same throughout life.

Outer Landscape expresses the idea that every living being shares this inner life through what they allow others to see. This exterior facade gives others a glimpse into what is going on inside but there are many aspects that are kept locked away. Some beings are more open than others so it is easier to imagine what their interior life is like but in truth, we can never really know.

Exhibitions: The graphite drawing of Spirit Guide was exhibited at the Kehler Liddell Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut during their It's a Wonderful Life: Celebrate with Art exhibition. The serigraph of Outer Landscape is being exhibited at the Mystic Museum of Art, 9 Water Street in Mystic, Connecticut from January 12- March 10th, 2018.

Update: The silkscreen of Spirit Guide and both Inner and Outer Landscape will be exhibited at Taos Art Insurgency: The New Protagonists, a National Juried Exhibition. The gallery exhibition is Saturday April 21 – May 12, 2018 at Greg Moon Art, Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, and David Anthony Fine Art on Kit Carson Road in Taos, NM. They will also be shown at the 2018 Essex Town Green Outdoor Summer Arts Festival.  The Essex Summer Arts Festival will occur Sat, June 9 (10-5pm) and Sun, June 10 (11-5pm) at the Essex Town Green, 12 Main Street, Essex CT. 

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Serigraphy

Kathleen Zimmerman is working with Modern Multiples, a professional printmaking studio in Los Angeles, California, to create the serigraphs from her drawings.  Serigraphy, also known as silk screening, screen printing or serigraph printing, is a stencil-based printing process in which ink is forced through a fine screen onto the paper beneath. Screens were originally made of silk, but they are now made of finely woven polyester or nylon. The concept of fine art printing has been popular since the 18th century, enabling artists to share their work with a broader range of admirers at a more accessible price. Since then, printmaking has evolved into another medium artists use to create artwork not just as a way to work in multiples. Silkscreen printing, also known as serigraph printing, is a medium that is increasingly valued for its versatility. It challenges the lithographic process in terms of the textural rendering of an image.

Kathleen has worked in various printing techiniques from etching to lithography both in art school as well as independently.  The last couple years, she has been experimenting with a relatively new printmaking process called photopolymer intaglio printing both at Dog's Eye Print Studio in Framingham, Massachusetts and at Zimmerman Fine Art Studio in Willington, Connecticut. She found she appreciated its ability to capture the tonality of her graphite drawings, while adding a rich, deep contrast that black ink offers. She tried using various colored inks but found that black ink with the addition of white charcoal exaggerated this contrast while adding a softness and texture to her prints that suited her work.  She decided to leave these prints as pure black and white statements. That being said, she also wanted to see if she could use color in a way that it would not become a distraction but would add meaning to her work. So she began experimenting with color in her digital archival prints. Well, after much experimentation, she found simplicity and intentionality were the key to making color work with her images.  'Less was more' in her case. Although happy with these small prints, she wondered if there was another printmaking medium that would capture the freshness of the digital prints but on a larger scale with the slight variations of hand-pulled prints. Luckily, Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts, was offering a workshop on fine art screen-printing throughout the month of February in 2017. So Kathleen attended and promptly fell in love with serigraphy or commonly known as fine art screen-printing. She liked the fresh contemporary look this medium offered and thought it would be perfect medium in which to add vibrant color and layering. Besides these benefits, the woven texture of the screen enhanced her original drawings' texture adding another element to these works. So after doing some research, she found the master printers at Modern Multiples. Kathleen began working with them shortly afterwards to refine some of her drawings so they could be used as the basis for the stencils, which are used to make serigraphic prints. The first two serigraphs are shown in the images above and below. Titled "Block Head Series - Otters & Block Head Series - Monkey", both of these works were printed as limited editions of 24 with 2 artists proofs and 3 prints placed in the collections of the printmakers at Modern Multiples. 

Exhibitions: Both Block Head Series - Sea (Otters) & Block Head Series - Tree (Monkey) can be seen in exhibition along with several of Kathleen's intaglio prints; Space Series - Milky Way, Space Series - Monkey Mars, Space Series - Night Mare, Space Series - Rabbit Hole, Space Series - Saturn Siesta, Hood Series - Father, Hood Series - Mother and Cosmic Cow Series - Light Dark, in her solo exhibition at Artists Live located at the Nash-Zimmer Transporation Center, 23 Royce Circle in Storrs, Connecticut, November 1 - November 30, 2017. *This exhibition is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Connecticut's Office of the Arts and WindhamArts.

Update: Block Head Series - Tree (Monkey) was juried into 2018 Spectrum "What's Now/ What's New" exhibition and can be seen at the Carriage Barn Arts Center, 681 South Avenue, New Canaan, CT. This exhibition starts April 20th and runs through May 24th.  The Opening reception will be on April 20th from 6-8 pm. Block Head Series - Sea (Otters) will be shown at the Taos Art Insurgency: The New Protagonists, a National Juried Exhibition. The gallery exhibition is Saturday April 21 – May 12, 2018 at Greg Moon Art, Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, and David Anthony Fine Art on Kit Carson Road in Taos, NM. The Block Head Series will also be on exhibit at the 2018 Essex Town Green Outdoor Summer Arts Festival. It will occur at Sat, June 9 (10-5pm); Sun, June 10 (11-5pm) Essex Town Green, 12 Main Street, Essex CT. 

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Artists Live

Artists Live is a program curated and created by Kathleen Zimmerman in partnership with the Mansfield Downtown Partnership. It is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, State of Connecticut's Office of the Arts and WindhamArts, making it possible for regional professional level artists to show and interact with the community in and around Storrs in Mansfield, Connecticut. 

Artists Live is an art program created to enhance what the Mansfield Downtown Partnership, Inc. and the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry are already doing in Storrs Center by adding the visual arts to their program of events. At the designated site, the Nash-Zimmer Transportation Center at 23 Royce Circle, Kathleen Zimmerman will curate a series of exhibitions, lead artists discussions and facilitate an active exchange between the guest artists and the public. The Mansfield Downtown Partnership will provide the place where the community can view the work throughout each month as well as meet and interact with the participating artists. This way the community can gain insight into the creative process and an understanding of what it is like to be a working artist. The artists, in turn will share their work and their knowledge with the public in this intimate space, fostering a greater understanding between the artists and the community. The Mansfield Downtown Partnership thus will be able to continue their support for the arts and make Storrs Center the place to go for current culture enhancing this area both for the temporary student and the permanent resident populations. It will provide an alternative choice to the imported and historic artists work that is currently what the community has access to by granting access to some of the state's award-winning  "living" artists. 

The program provides one exhibition and artist discussion per month starting in March 2017 running throughout December 2017 with the exception of August. The exhibitions will begin the first Friday of each month and will be on view until the final Friday of that month. The site will be open and free of charge to the public Monday through Friday 8am - 5pm and Saturday 10am - 4pm. Additionally, each final Friday of the month from 5pm - 6pm, the exhibiting artist will engage in an artist discussion with Kathleen Zimmerman followed by a reception from 6pm-7pm providing the artist and the public a chance to become better acquinted. The participating artists are Gigi Horr Liverant, Anne Eisner, Frank Bruckmann, Gar Waterman, Oi Fortin, Jean Dalton, Lynita Shimizu, Nan Runde, Kathleen Zimmerman and John Harris in that order. 

Regional Arts Grant was awarded to Kathleen Zimmerman & The Mansfield Downtown Partnership. 

Note: Kathleen Zimmerman will be exhibiting from the first Friday until the final Friday in November 2017. All of the above intaglio prints will be on exhibit along with Block Head Series and Space Series at the Nash-Zimmer Transportation Center, 23 Royce Circle in Storrs, Connecticut. 

Update: Cosmic Cow Series - Light Dark and the Hood Series - Father & Mother will be on exhibit at the 2018 Essex Town Green Outdoor Summer Arts Festival. It will occur at Sat, June 9 (10-5pm); Sun, June 10 (11-5pm) Essex Town Green, 12 Main Street, Essex CT.  

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Westville Gallery Celebrates Valentines Day With “Couples”

Article in New Haven Independent by ALLAN APPEL | Feb 11, 2016 3:56 pm

(photos provided by Zimmerman Fine Art Studio)

Forget those pulsating red hearts, those shiny diamond rings, the giant glistening chocolates, and all the broad-brush emotion and extravagant color of traditional Valentine’s Day contemporary iconography.

For a Valentine’s Day venue that eschews bombast yet celebrates pairing, try “Couples,” a holiday-themed exhibition of Kathleen Zimmerman‘s prints and sculptures.

It runs at the Kehler Liddell Gallery in Westville through Sunday; Zimmerman will be on hand that day to chat and talk about “Couples.”

“I find beauty in simple lines and forms,” Zimmerman has written, and she practices what she preaches in the generally small scale intaglio prints that line the central space of the gallery.

Zimmerman’s work — pairings in different formations and settings of images of animals, trees, musicians, watery surfaces, and lovers, among others — is all in black and white, with a touch of color only here or there, because, as she also notes, “I only use color when it adds to the meaning.”

In this show the meanings have primarily to do with the effect on the viewer, as well as the artist, of dealing in doubles. As none of us is ever able to get out of ourselves, dealing in doubles seems a way to handle that thorny epistemological problem.

“I don’t always work in pairs, but when I was getting ready for this exhibition I began thinking how I use them in my work,” Zimmerman wrote to this reporter by email. “Sometimes I use separate yet related work to make one visual statement. I use mirrored images to demonstrate the strength of a design. I look at two different ways of thinking in the same image and sometimes I even work back and forth between two dimensional and three dimensional media exploring the same idea.”

Zimmerman’s work is complemented in the front and back area galleries at Kehler Liddell by samples of the work of the cooperative gallery’s other artists.Some of them, like photographer Mark K. St. Mary, got in the couples frame of mind by showing paired works as well.  In St. Mary’s case, his intense, archival photo prints, almost microscopic views of sections of painted over, abandoned storefront doors, originally were in a grouping larger than two.  The others in the group did not converse with each other “tonally,” he said. So he pulled from them a single pair.

Note: Kathleen's exhibition Couples runs from January 14th through February 14th, 2016. Kehler Liddell Gallery is located at 873 Whalley Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Gallery showcases local artists

JAMES POST    JAN 25, 2016
STAFF REPORTER AT YALE DAILY NEWS

Northern wall of Couples installation.

New Haven’s Kehler Liddell Gallery hosted an opening reception on Sunday for two exhibitions that will run until Valentine’s Day and set the stage for the Elm City’s celebration of love. One exhibition, entitled “Couples,” features the work of local artist and Kehler Liddell Gallery member Kathleen Zimmerman. “New Year/New Work,” the second exhibition showcases the work of 20 of the 21 artists who are members of this Whalley Avenue gallery. Casey McDougal, a Screen Actor’s Guild actor, performed a mini-play inspired by “Couples,” during the reception.

“Well, since it’s coming up to Valentine’s Day, I decided to think about how I used paired images in my work,” Zimmerman said. “There are a number of [artists in the other exhibition] that played off of my theme, too.”

Southern wall of Couples installation.

Zimmerman’s exhibition builds off her earlier work, in particular “EastWest Series” —  a collection of prints that brought Eastern and Western ideas together, visually comparing the two cultures. For “Couples,” Zimmerman expanded upon the concept of mirrored, paired and reflected images.

Eastern wall of Couples installation.

The theme of “Couples” naturally complements Zimmerman’s preferred medium, printmaking, Zimmerman said. The etching or carving from which a print is made is always a mirror image of the print itself.

“[The exhibition’s concept] depended upon the strength of the design … because sometimes, you look at [a design] one way and it looks fine, and you flip it over and you think it’s terrible,” Zimmerman said. “I started realizing that I can draw both ways and the design will work both ways.”

Western wall of Couples installation.

“New Year/New Work,” features a diverse collection of etchings, sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and photographs from the other gallery members — all of which are from the Greater New Haven region. For group shows, all gallery members are invited to contribute. Gar Waterman, a co-founder of the gallery, noted that the gallery is currently an “unusual hybrid” of its typical self. Usually, the gallery features two solo shows and one group show with a single piece from each gallery member, Waterman said. But because the only solo show is Zimmerman’s, “New Year/New Work” features multiple works from each contributing member. This amalgam of art pieces captures the rich history of collaboration among the gallery’s artists.

“This gallery came out of a development that my wife, [Thea Buxbaum], was part of founding called ‘ArLoW,’ ArtLoftsWest, which is actually New Haven’s first and only artist-affordable housing program,” Waterman said. “We helped get this place off the ground with a few other artists who we knew at the time, and it has managed to keep its doors open for the last 10 years or so.”

Note: Kathleen's exhibition Couples runs from January 14th through February 14th. Kehler Liddell Gallery is located at 873 Whalley Avenue in New Haven, Connecticut.

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