Two artists featured at Trinidad gallery

The Trinidad Art Gallery is featuring the work of printmaker Patricia Sundgren Smith and woodworker Tom Kingshill in April.

Kingshill is inspired by lumber of the surrounding landscape. Using a wood lathe, he takes foraged sections of local trees and creates decorative vessels for the home. He specializes in natural-edge bowls. The elements of smooth, machine-like precision and natural, raw undulations of the untamed surface of a tree come together in the form of the bowl.

Over the years his passion for working bowls with natural edges has only increased, but the challenges are increasing as well.

“I am now challenged to come up with new ideas creating natural edge bowls,” Kingshill said. “The biggest challenge in wood turning is finding the product. Unlike other mediums the resource is becoming less and less.”

Kingshill was born into a family of carpenters. At an early age, he became familiar with woodworking techniques and has spent his life exploring various techniques and products.

Smith’s prints display a variety of subjects and media. Each year, she carves and prints a new series of linocuts based on a particular theme. This year, she has chosen a particularly life-affirming theme, nesting birds and bird’s nest imagery, using three techniques.

In one approach, she uses high-fiber papers such as Asian lemongrass, Thai banana fiber, haystack abaca, Japanese chiri and Himalayan lotka, which is textured with raised surfaces. Her bird nests are carved on Silk Cut plates from Australia, printed on high-fiber paper with sepia ink, cut into nest shapes and mounted on archival printmaking paper. The eggs are printed on contrasting paper. Each of the three components is printed separately, dried and then mounted. The nests with high-fiber paper mounted on white paper have a three-dimensional look.

In another approach, after carving the nest images onto plates, Smith inks the plates with Charbonnel sepia ink and prints the images on archival white printmaking paper.

The third technique involves using Prismacolor pencils, graphite and ink. With this technique she has created two framed diptychs featuring a drawing of a marsh wren and a linocut of a marsh wren’s nest.

Smith takes great pleasure in finding her theme and experimenting with the many possibilities that printmaking offers.

“I hope that viewers will enjoy the images as much as I did in making them,” she said.

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The work of these two artists can be seen along with the work of 20 fellow artists whose work is displayed at the Trinidad Art Gallery. For more information, call 707-677-3770 or visit trinidadartgallery.com.