It’s no Sistine Chapel, but Maureen May has nonetheless given folks a lot to look at this month at Steaming Bean Coffee Co.
May is an artist of many talents and pursuits, among them printmaking. To be more specific, monoprinting. Like many career artists, May has accumulated quite a bit of extraneous materials through the years. Among them was an enormous – 45-by-18-feet enormous – roll of printmaking paper. Rather than attempt the Michaelangeloan feat of creating one huge artwork, May decided to cut the job, and the paper, down to size. It’s still pretty big.
“I had to tear it by hand into 10-inch strips. It’s not an exact science,” May said.
For “inch by inch, step by step,” she ended up with three 18-foot by 10-inch strips of paper. Monoprinting is not like drawing, or even painting. May’s oil-based inks take several days to dry, and she worked in 2-foot sections at a time. May spent about three hours on each of those sections, so the math becomes easy if not exhausting. Including several smaller 3-foot by 9-inch works, the monoprints hanging at the Bean represent about 90 hours of work by the artist.
“I had to go back and forth two or three times, and the black ink was even harder,” she said.
Unlike standard printmaking, which usually involves a manufactured plate swathed in ink pressed onto a surface, monoprinting is handmade and unique. Instead of printing the complete image of a car, for example, a monoprint would involve separate layers of contact for the wheels, doors, roof, etc., and each subsequent print would be slightly different because of offsets caused by the imperfection of the human hand. May relishes such imperfections.
“I just went with what felt right,” she said. “I like doing monoprints that way. It’s a challenge, but it seems comfortable for me, if that makes sense.
You won’t see such recognizable images as a car in May’s latest collection. The images are much more abstract but are meticulously and painstakingly separated. The effect is a result of the unique workshop May established in her studio above Durango Arts Center.
There’s hardly room for a table in there let alone an 18-foot long table, so May rigged a system that allowed her to loop the monoprints while each layer dried.
“Figuring out the mechanics of advancing wet oil-based ink was very tricky,” May said.
The untitled pieces are for sale. May will subdivide the large pieces into 2-foot segments, but each segment was created with a transition to the next, so any adjoining pieces complement each other. One of the large pieces is off the market; May submitted it for inclusion in Shy Rabbit Contemporary Arts’ “The Art of It All” exhibit in October in Pagosa Springs. She learned the art of monoprinting several years ago from Shy Rabbit founder and co-owner Michael Coffee.
ted@durangoherald.com
If you go
“inch by inch, step by step,” new artwork by Maureen May, through September at Steaming Bean Coffee Co., 915 Main Ave. For more information, email maymaureen@yahoo.com.
