MARSHFIELD - "Prints and Drawings," a summer art exhibit featuring artists Cathy Jean Clark and Sue Wendlandt, will open with an artists’ reception at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 20, in Gallery 450 in the Helen Connor Laird Fine Arts Building at the UW-Marshfield/Wood County.

“This exciting new exhibition will be the highlight of our summer exhibition season,” said Dierauer, manager of Gallery 450. “It will bring together two artists who are ‘surface experts’ in the areas of printmaking and drawing. The viewer will experience a display of lines, colors and textures with imagery that will intrigue amaze and provoke new thoughts, questions and opinions. At the same time, the viewer will see a duality in the handling of the printmaking and drawing processes.”

Printmaking is a multi-task, multi-layering, time-consuming surface process, Dierauer said.  It is arduous in the thought processing and execution, functioning on what can seem to be an almost mystical level of mental and physical-energy consumption.

“Drawing on the other hand is arguably the most direct of all artistic mediums,” she said. “It is an automatic, primal human response to take a stick, pencil, crayon, ink, graphite and beyond to scribe on surface, an immediacy of thought, emotion or imagery that pre-dates verbal language usage in humans.”

The similarities in these two very different mediums are the issue of surface. Surface is to printmakers, drafters and painters what space is to sculptors, engineers and architects. It is the thing that gets "taken on" by the artist and manipulated to exciting new outcomes.

The work of Cathy Jean Clark focuses on gardens – an important component of the Wisconsin landscape.  Clark’s research focuses on why gardens are so important to people, herself included.

“There seems to be many deep archetypal connections to the garden that we are not aware of consciously and do not fully understand and comprehend,” Clark said. “I believe the ‘garden’ to be how we physically and spiritually connect to the earth. It is our psychic umbilical cord to our planet.  Through my prints and drawings, I hope to awaken these deep subconscious feelings that are primal to our humanness."

The sense of rhythm in Clark’s work expresses the cycles that are an integral part of nature and life itself.

“(It’s about) the rhythms of birth, life, fruition, death, decay and re-birth - matter being transformed from one form to another. My work is often dark in order to communicate that there is so much more to life than what we see with our eyes.  We need to engage all our senses, even that which we may not be aware of at this time.  The darkness suggests us to travel from the conscious world to the unconscious world.”

Artist Sue Wendlandt comes from a different set of experiences and interests.  Her compositions are created through unconventional methods and are a vehicle for her “soul to express personal life experiences, often reflecting my experience as an individual with ADHD and as a parent of ADHD children."

Through a piece of writing entitled "Speak No Evil," Wendlandt described her creative process.

"Silent to the ear are my drawings, but the imagery resonates my muted pain. The paper and I are one in the same material.  We have been consumed with blackness, experimented with through the use of unusual methods to achieve the desire result, stroked with a soft touch to conceal the marks beneath our surface and restricted by the deckle edge tears creating the great divides between this family of compositions.  We are a reality altered through the mechanics of present-day society and restricted by the excepted common place frame work to create a desired appearance for the public to view at this time."

Gallery 450 is open 11 a.m.–6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays and during all performances in the Helen Connor Laird Theatre.

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