“Places from Two Points of View,” is the current exhibit at the Coutts Museum of Art.
This exhibit highlights prints by Stephen M. Perry and paintings by Diana Werts.
The public is invited to attend a special showing and reception from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday. The artists will talk at 7 p.m.
Stephen M. Perry
Perry grew up and lives in Wichita. As a young boy, he would go to visit his grandfather and see the interesting prints hanging in his home. Years later, those same pieces are hanging in his own home and he has an even greater appreciation of the prints.
Perry found out that his grandfather was an associate member of the Prairie Printmakers and had received the annual gift prints that were sent out to the members and are now prized by print collectors.
Largely because of his grandfather and that print collection, he has developed a passion for printmaking and is working with intaglio and relief prints in his own printmaking studio. Perry was excited to have been asked to be the 2010 Gift Print Artist for the Coutts Art Museum. He feels like he now has some connection to those legendary Prairie Printmakers that set the standard for regionalist printmaking in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Most of his prints are traditional regionalist images of rural landscapes, iconic structures and scenes from the back roads of America. He is currently exploring the use of Solarplate, which opens up some exciting new techniques in creative image-making possibilities. In addition, he is now adding watercolor tints to his black and white prints following the printing process.
Perry will include some of those images in the upcoming showing.
The 2010 Coutts Museum of Art Membership Gift Print, which he did last year, was a traditional copper plate etching depicting a scene found in Butler County and one of his backroad wanderings.
“A sense of place runs as a deep current through all of my artwork,” he said. “Each location has its own identity…its own reason for being as it is. What is the character of the place? What elements make one location unique from another? I try to capture the feeling, the texture and the essence of what makes the scene different and recognizable.”
Perry has been lucky to have had a creative career that has included pen and ink illustration, creative writing, graphic design, architectural rendering, publishing, silkscreen printmaking, landscape architecture and now, printmaker, travel writer and owner of the Backroads Press Studio. The one thread that has tied all of his work together has been his appreciation of the natural landscape and the desire to interpret that appreciation to others.
His art background began at the Kansas State University with several art classes including a printmaking overview. Perry’s senior year project in landscape architecture was a self-directed character study of the Kansas Flint Hills which included more than 25 pen and ink illustrations, photographs and writings. That project was published by the Kansas Department of Economic Development in 1972 as promotional material for the Flint Hills.
Upon graduation, his career in landscape architecture led to the design of many notable area projects, including the entrance features at Wichita State University, the West Douglas/ Delano streetscape project, the El Dorado sign at the Kansas Turnpike and the Boundless Playground at Sedgwick County Park. He was fortunate enough to become a partner in a multi-disciplinary architectural firm, but always continued to develop his pen and ink work depicting the rural Kansas landscape.
Recently, his illustrations have appeared in the Symphony in the Flint Hills program booklet and publications. His designs were also selected for the 1982 Wichita River Festival poster and the Charter Edition poster for Botanica, the Wichita Gardens.
Diana Werts
While Werts lived in Emporia from 1971 to 1987, she enjoyed hundreds of trips through the Flint Hills to her hometown of Wichita.
As an art student at Emporia State University, she developed her visual skills by observing the ever changing color, light and space of this rich environment. Over this time Werts earned a bachelor of science degree in art, a K-12 teaching certificate and a master of science in painting. She has taught in Wichita Public Schools, private lessons around Wichita and Kansas City, worked as an artist in residence in Winfield, Wichita and throughout Kansas and Missouri, as well as conducting art and music programs through Young Audiences of Kansas City. Presently she is teaching art full time at Bishop Miege High School in Shawnee Mission.
Werts has worked in many subject areas which include florals, figures in rooms, portraiture, landscape and stylized abstract florals. During college, she was steeped in abstract expressionism which emphasized the process of painting over subject matter. Over her last 35 years of painting, landscape has always remained a primary interest.
About 10 years ago she began using pastel which adds new insights to her oil technique. Her preferred painting scenario is to visit a scene and get to know it through direct observation by painting in plein air. As she works outdoors on a site, she finds that the spontaneity of workings directly allows her to experience the living drama of light and atmosphere with less emphasis on mental interpretation. Then she photographs the scene and returns to her studio to develop the image, based on what surfaced in the outdoor experience. At this point, she explores her reactions to the scene that has been recorded, applying her limited personal history to the timeless scene that has presented itself. The result is a personal reflection that connects her to the bigger world; her desire is to translate something about this land, and her individual response to it, to the viewer.
“I recently observed a friend standing in prairie grasses that were taller than herself,” she said. “I was struck by the fragile yet firmly rooted nature of the grasses. They are fluid in the way they sway, and are ripe with fertility as they offer up their seeds to the sky. The deep implications and historical presence of these grasses is worthy of contemplation and visual exploration, and has become a theme for this recent body of work. Visually, the grasses add an element of line and vertical emphasis which provides contrast to the sweeping horizontal orientation of land and sky. I am also interested in the fragility of the grasses in their imperial gesture of reaching to the sky.”
This exhibit, which opened Aug. 3, will be at the museum through September. The public is invited to attend the reception as well as come in and view the exhibit during regular museum hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Friday and noon to 4 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free and the museum is lcoated at 110 N. Main. For more information call 321-1212.
