Linoleum block printing will be the focus of the next Kishwaukee Valley Art League meeting, to be held at 7:30 p.m. May 7 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, on the corner of North Fourth and Locust streets in DeKalb. The guest demonstrator for the evening will be KVAL vice president Erin Nolan.
Nolan is a versatile artist who has worked with a variety of media, including glass fusing, acrylic painting, metal work and wood burning, but most of her current work and the subject of her KVAL program is linocut, or linoleum block printing.
Nolan says she has always enjoyed drawing and doing creative things, but that her formal art training began at Kishwaukee College and then for a year and a half at NIU. However, took a break from art for 18 years between then and 2007, when she took up painting for her own enjoyment.
Nolan became interested in relief printing while watching her brother create wood-block prints. She tried wood, but found that her hands weren’t strong enough, so she switched to linoleum block. In her KVAL demonstration, she plans to show the process by which she creates a linocut, from developing the idea to printing the block. She will also provide a brief history of the art form.
Nolan says she has the best job in the world, as described in a recent news release. She works full time as a graphic designer/illustrator/creative consultant at OC Imageworks, a large-format printer in DeKalb. She has put those skills to work for KVAL, redesigning the KVAL logo and recently designing a new brochure for the group.
Local residents might have seen Nolan’s work at her solo show, “Organic Narrative,” at the DeKalb Area Women’s Center last year. Although she has only been doing relief painting for about a year, she won an honorable mention at the “Vicinity 2008 Art Exhibit” at the Norris Cultural Art Center in St. Charles.
She was also selected as a featured artist at the Venus Envy show at the Bucktown Center for the Arts in Davenport, Iowa, and her work has been published in two consecutive issues of KNOCK, Door County’s literary arts magazine.
05.05.2009 DeKalb Daily Chronicle
http://www.daily-chronicle.com/articles/2009/04/29/04504713/index.xml
