Stone Writing
Perry Obee
28 April 2017 - 22 May 2017
OPENING RECEPTION Friday, 28 April 2017, 5 - 8 pm
I am a painter and printmaker whose playful imagery comments on the inseparability of art and life. Balancing painterly representation with underlying abstraction is what strikes one most immediately about my work. A sense of ambiguity, subtlety and harmony make it all the more effective. - Perry Obee, 2016
Bio
Perry Obee is a professional artist working in the mediums of painting, drawing, and printmaking from his studio in Marshall, NC. He apprenticed with a Tamarind Master Printer for 9 years studying traditional stone and plate lithography, intaglio, and relief printmaking, and also did work in paper making and adhesive processes. Perry maintains an active studio practice and is also an educator with significant experience teaching workshops and private classes, as well as university and college courses in studio art and art history.
Visit perryobee.com for more information.
Statement
Lithography is a printmaking technique that was described by it's inventor, Aloys Senefelder, in 1798 as "chemical printing". Based on the principle that water and grease don't mix, lithographs are made by drawing or painting onto a slab of thick limestone and then chemically treating the stone to "remember" the artist's drawing. The stone is able to capture subtle details and spontaneous drawing marks of the artist, unlike any other printmaking medium. The works in this exhibition cover landscape, still life, and portraits that Perry has produced over the past 2 years. Perry explores the unique mark making capabilities of lithography, as well as the layering of drawings through counter-etch techniques, multi-color prints, and experimentation with different papers and chine-colle printing. In all of Perry's work, he blurs the boundary between representation and abstraction and plays with the viewer’s understanding of the images. Interested in gestalt visual psychology, Perry examines how our minds perceive and understand imagery. In his imagery, he creates dynamic play between recognizable three-dimensional subject matter and the flat two-dimensional forms of painterly mark making.