Betsey Garand:
Proof of Existence – Drawings and Prints
Visiting Artist Exhibit at the UVM Colburn Gallery
March 28th – April 8th
Gallery Talk and Reception at 5:30 on April 7th
Betsey Garand grew up in New Hampshire on a small, self-sufficient family farm. She received her BFA in Printmaking from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art of Temple University. Betsey is presently Resident Artist at Amherst College in the Department of Art and the History of Art, where she is head of printmaking.
Artist Statement:
The recent prints and drawings represent themes and interests of continuum, balance, and growth, elements existent in physical and psychological life. Seemingly familiar objects are layered beneath and above biomorphic and geometric shapes. Garand has numerous influences, one of which is a childhood spent in the woodlands and fields of New Hampshire:
The seed to my work was planted in Hancock, New Hampshire. Growing up surrounded by nature, I made countless hours of observances of natural forms and spectacles from static frogs’ eggs suspended in gelled encasements, plump spider bellies in dew laden webs, a maple leaf, a fern, the pattern of birch bark. This infinite variety of form, color and change inherent in nature has continued to significantly impact my prints and drawings.
In my work, I observe and invent. A source of inspiration is evident in the symbology of shapes utilized in pictographs and petroglyphs by indigenous peoples from the Anza-Borrego Desert to the Chauvet Cave. This combination of observed and invented shapes to create imagery and a form of written, visual language is paradoxically narrative and symbolic as well as representational and abstract. It interests me that two horned goats are adjacent to a quadranted circle or the head of a feline is adjacent to a dot pattern. The significance of this imagery is ever present and powerful, an entwinement of nature and geometry.
We’re only ever seeing part of something larger, a glimpse, a section, a fragment of a whole. An ever-expanding vision quest of recognition, for the past and the future. My imagery moves between the imagined and seen, the miniscule and vast, the microcosm and macrocosm. All are connected, with the beginning and end unknown. The simplicity of complexity and complexity of simplicity.
Image: Hark II, 2010, Two zinc plates: lift-ground aquatint monoprint and monotype
