Jean Harkin‘s life has been filled with outdoor recreation and explorations, and has become the inspiration for her work. Says Jean, “I have never wanted to recreate the objects I’ve seen but try to express the impressions they have given me. The power of a burned forest, rushing water, rock formations, trees, the patterns in things like bark or rocks, contrasts of light and dark in a coming storm—these are some of what stir me to create.”
Jean is enamored of printmaking’s endless possibilities and intrigue. Jean explains, “My prints often have layers of transparent colors or transparent colors in a dance with opaque colors. This surface creates a rich play of hues, patterns and shapes that I hope a viewer finds inviting.” Jean’s monotypes and mixed-media prints are often built up with layers of inks, pencil, pastel, and paint, and sometimes those layers are scraped away to get to the desired effect. (Monotypes, by definition, are one-of-a-kind prints.)
About the Exhibit
These four monotype /mixed media prints are the beginning of a new series of work in Jean Harkin’s B and B Burn series. The first series on the B and B Complex fire of 2003 was done in 2004 with paint and mixed media.
Ten to twelve years after the burn, Jean found the forest elegant with standing black and grey beauties. Many of the old ones ravaged by fire, cold winters, hot summers, winds, and rain still stood, bare and lovely. She observed that fire released their seeds that then sprouted into young pines and firs. Together with these, grasses, flowers, insects, birds, animals, and humans returned to stand as monuments to the continuing cycle of life and death.
These pieces began as prints done with Akua inks. Next, pastels, pencils, scratching, and charcoal were applied. Sometimes the ink comes through the applied work, sometimes the ink disappears underneath. This belies the layering process that Jean so much enjoys.
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