Printmaker makes home in fireplace gallery until May 30

The Portland printmaker taking residence in the Fireplace Gallery in the Student Union with her exhibit “Natural Reliefs” finds her work to be a fun and challenging experience.

Kelli MacConnell, a 2012 graduate of PSU, said, “I have dabbled in a few different kinds (of printmaking.)”  MacConnell has worked with screen printing and relief printmaking.

Relief printing is her main focus. “With that process, traditionally it is woodblock printing,” she said. MacConnell also uses the Linocut technique for her relief printmaking, which uses linoleum. “I do a little of both. My main focus right now is linocut relief printmaking,” she said.

Making the move from Ohio to Portland in 2006, she attended PSU to achieve a bachelor of fine arts. MacConnell works at a café on the weekends and is also a mom.

In the past six months she has been cutting her hours in order to dedicate more time to her art. “Right now I’m in the transition period to doing art full time,” she said.

Growing up, MacConnell was into drawing and working with oil pastels. “Through my early college years I was still mainly doing charcoal and pastels and drawing and painting as well.”

She took her first printmaking class as a sophomore in college. “I didn’t know anything about printmaking, but it just opened a new world to me. I just felt like it was using so many things and more,” MacConnell said.

The artist, who does most of her prints in black and white oil-based ink, said, “With the printmaking process, you reverse the image onto a block.” MacConnell’s current work is focused on Pacific Northwest landscapes, “so I go out into the field and do sketches and take photographs,” she said.

MacConnell will do a sketch of the image that she wants to see a final product of. She said that image is essentially reversed “because I would be carving it into a block, printing it onto paper. So when I carve it, it needs to be the reversed image,” she said.

According to MacConnell, there are numerous ways she could transfer her image onto the block. “I can transfer onto tracing paper and reverse it that way. If it is a photograph I can reverse it, in Photoshop or something like that, and then from there I can make a sketch. And I will sketch that onto the block and from there I will use release carving tools,” she said.

“I will carve away whatever is going to be white or the negative space or any sort of highlight. I will be carving that away. You are carving away, around the object,” she said.

MacConnell said that carving the image into the block is “fun and challenging at the same time. One of the challenges is looking at that block and visualizing my final product and trying to form that.”

She said that sometimes the reaction to the final product varies. “You have a good idea but sometimes things happen and between when you’re rolling the ink and it’s in the press it comes out the other side and you pull the paper up and you’re like, ‘Oh my gosh! This is amazing!’ or sometimes you look at it and you’re like, ‘This is horrible…,’” MacConnell said.

In printmaking, all of the prints are considered originals. MacConnell will make up to 30 prints of each image. “These are all considered original prints even though they look very similar, because they are hand printed and then each print I do an edition of a certain number, so it shows the value of it,” she said.

MacConnell signs and numbers each print, and when that edition is sold out, it is considered expired. According to her, if she ever wanted to do another edition of an expired print, she would then “have to change something about the block. Something would have to be different about it,” she said.

Her prints focus on Pacific Northwest landscapes. She said, “I’ve always been drawn to nature.”

MacConnell is an avid hiker, biker and “I love exploring the wilderness so it’s been something that resonates with me and comes out in my art. The Pacific Northwest landscape has been my focus on this large body of work for probably the last four years. I still feel like I have so much that I want to cover, so I feel like it’s probably not going to change anytime soon,” she said.

Her exhibit “Natural Reliefs,” is on display in the Fireplace Gallery in the Student Union until the end of May.