P.C. BUCHANAN

Artist Statement:

For the last few years I have been working mainly with monoprints or monotypes.  I moved towards this medium as I experienced the color and quality of inks and the unique character of papers.  With the technique involved, I work directly with the printed image.  I apply ink to paper and build my image in a one-at-a-time color addition. 

The papers that I use in my monoprints are important personal and technical choices.  The surface quality of a paper like, for instance, Arches 88, which is the smooth, white paper I often use, offers a technical (compositional) tool for printing.  But it is equally important that the paper be seen as an integrated part of the print, versus just a hosting surface – that it breathes and moves and takes space just as color does.

Color is for me emotion and activity.  To make it passive or dramatic, to give it its conduct, is to move it in a space that it crates and in the picture-plane that it relates to.  While I work with the qualities of the materials in mind, I work to move beyond this so that my color and form open up the emotional intention and view of the print.

Overall, my art is a visual journal where personal experiences are the roots of the printed form, where feelings and internal impressions come from the physical, external expressions of life as I meet them.  Birth, death, strength, laughter, anonymity in a strange city, the rhythm of doorways in a Minneapolis neighborhood, subway graffiti, cathedral windows – all those bits of life come back to paper, to color and to line.