Katie Gilmartin

I met Katie Gilmartin at a show in December, where I peppered her with questions about how she executed her mixed viscosity and lino-cut prints. Armed with the story of her signature technique, I followed up for the rest of her story.

Always the studious type while growing up in Long Island, Katie Gilmartin's bookish tendencies were matched by her creative pursuits early in school. Indeed, a book-making project assigned by her favorite art teacher foreshadowed a lifelong relationship with books, words and the creative process, but the story would take time to unfold:

"I did actually more art as a kid than I did in my early adult life. Once I went to college I had this crazy idea that I had to get serious and buckle down and dispense with all such frivolousness"

Majoring in English Literature at Oberlin College, Gilmartin now regrets somewhat not getting involved with the reputable art program there. She went on to graduate school at Yale, first for literature and then switching to American Studies

"American studies enabled me to branch out a little bit. Whereas literature is pretty much you're studying texts, American Studies gave room for studying all kinds of things including more pop culture things, including doing oral history interviews, at looking more at art. So I started to get more interested in those things, but still I was on my route to a career"

Gilmartin focused her research on Lesbian History, collecting oral histories of women in the Rocky Mountain region about their experiences in the 1940s-60s. It was in this research that she was introduced to pulp novels and their importance.

"The 40s, the 50s, the 60s really interest me a lot. As a historian, that was the period I studied [...] Really interesting things were going on with gender roles at that time. Gender roles actually got more conservative then they had been in the 20s and 30s. And yet today [...] most people look back at that time and think that that's normal, that that's how gender roles have always been, when in fact that was a certain rather conservative [movement]"

With this polarization of gender roles, Gilmartin also observes a counter-weight in the portrayal of feminine sexuality. Perhaps not by coincidence, Gilmartin sees the roles and portrayals rebalanced in contemporary society: 

"I think there was an incredible power to women's sexuality in that period. I think it was in part because women didn't have access to power in a whole lot of other ways, but it seems like there's a lot of imagery of women from the time, and literature as well, of women using their erotic power - using the power of their bodies - in ways that I'm not sure happens in the same way anymore"

After getting her doctorate, Gilmartin went on to teach Women's Studies, American Studies and Community Studies at UC Santa Cruz for ten years. Although she enjoyed teaching, her academic role was unsatisfying:

"I was miserable! So, I started taking printmaking classes [...] It was kind of a shot in the dark and it ended up really working for me"

First studying with Debora Iyall at InkClan (now SOMArts), Gilmartin was initially attracted to printmaking by the aesthetic of WPA and Soviet-era relief-type posters and prints. However, after living in the cerebral world of academia, the physical application of printmaking was also attractive:

"Part of the reason I was attracted to [printmaking] as well is that it's really a craft. It's not just you and the paint. You learn your equipment and its a very physical medium: you carve your image with your hands"

As Gilmartin became more involved in printmaking, she began using educational skills to teach classes. Compared to the power struggle inherent in academic teaching, Gilmartin took immense satisfaction in teaching printmaking and she continues to teach today: 

"I really enjoy teaching in a context where we're both just there because we want to be [there]. The students are there because they really want to learn, not because they need to please me to get a grade"

Contrasting her happiness making and teaching printmaking with her academic role, Gilmartin's priorities began shifting:

"Part of what I was learning at that point of my life - it took me a long time to learn it, but it was a really big lesson for me - was that I end up happier if I follow what gives me pleasure. Sometimes I can't figure out why, but if it gives me pleasure I try to trust that and follow that."

Extracting herself from academia, however, was a long slow process:

"I gradually had less teaching to do and gradually did more and more printmaking. And then when I started teaching it became clear that between teaching, printmaking and doing my art I could actually make a modest living. And that finally gave me the courage to quit academia, but it took a while"

Despite having leapt from the ivory tower, Gilmartin's core academic interests continue to influence her work in many ways. On an visual level, she looks back to the same time period that she focused her research on:

"I get a lot of my inspiration from historical images, in part because contemporary society's aesthetic around female bodies is so focused on thinness [...] Thirty or forty or fifty years ago, there was much more of a celebration of a variety of women's bodies, but in particular fuller women's bodies. Which both represents me and also an aesthetic that I enjoy [...] When I was looking for images of women that I like to look at, a lot of that brought me back to that era"

Her "Pulps" series not only reflects a genre that she discovered doing her graduate studies, but it also satisfies her affinity for words. But instead of a library, Gilmartin frequents the pulp section of KAYO Books for samples of the over-the-top verbiage that defines the genre:

"I really enjoy working with words [...] The way I usually work is I come up with the text first and then the image kind of comes from that [...] I certainly use bits and pieces of actual pulps. Terms like, 'lusting hunks of women flesh,' I could not have come up with on my own! But a lot of what I actually do is editing them down [...] and really try to refine it down to convey the most impact in the fewest words"

Exploring many of the same gender and sexuality topics of her academic past, Gilmartin is now free to use humor and expression to engage and enlighten her audience:

"I think that there's a way in which poking fun or creating a satire of something helps people see it from a slight distance and maybe be able to laugh at it a little bit"

See Katie Gilmartin's work in "Hot! Hot!! Hot!!! Erotic Art" at the City Art Cooperative Gallery through February, where she will also participate in shows in March and June.

Sarah Newton

I met Sarah Newton at an Open Studios in October at the Noonin Building. We ran into each other again riding a bus from Hunters Point Shipyard studios.

As Sarah Newton prepares to celebrate her pet snake's nineteenth birthday, she reflects upon her early career ambitions:

"In the sixth grade I had decided to be a herpetologist, but I probably imagined that it consisting of drawing pictures of animals all day."

Rather than growing up in a house full of pet toads and turtles, Newton was surrounded by art supplies from her father's creative pursuits:

"We always had a lot of art materials and activities in our home, as my father experimented with a tremendous variety of art media, [...] so there were a lot of slightly used oil pastels, colored pencils, and paints around for us to use"

Newton also cites her Uncle, Van Scranton, a mixed media artist who also worked at UCSB, as an important early influence. She recalls visiting visiting a gallery that Scranton ran for a couple years:

"I think he wanted to support the artists around him and to curate shows that interested him. My cousin and I went to many of the gallery openings and my father had some photographs in a group show there."

Newton started high school in rural Pennsylvania, but returned to California for her senior year. Although she began taking figure drawing at a community college at 16, Newton wasn't excited about going to college, even after visiting art schools with her uncle. After traveling around the state working for a political action group, Newton gravitated towards San Francisco's urban environment:

"It has [been] important to me to live in a place where people are connected in public life. Where I see the people around me on the street, doing errands, meeting friends, talking on the corner, selling things on the sidewalk, playing music."

Newton started taking printmaking, as well as drawing, at San Francisco City College. Originally, she found prints to be an interesting supplement to paintings by artists like Edward Hopper:

"There had always been some painters whose work I was interested in and whose prints I thought captured something that their paintings did not" 

After taking classes for several years, Newton finally decided to pursue a BFA at California College of Arts, where she ultimately focused on printmaking. There she found guidance from instructors Charlie Gill, Barron Storey, and Larry McClary and was challenged to study the intimacies of place:

"One of our assignments in an illustration class was to spend an entire day at one specific location and sketch all day"

This interest in public spaces continued outside the classroom in Newton's everyday activities. As she would return to her apartment in the Mission district, Newton would observe both the activity of people on the street as well as deserted elements of the urban landscape:

"People move from one store and then you see them talking to a different group outside another place. Sometimes there weren't people but these were the only lit storefronts and still the invitation sort of spills out into the street [...] I wanted to capture something that wasn't friendly or welcoming but was still intriguing... something that draws you towards it even though you aren't included in it."

After graduating, Newton traveled around southern Europe and joined the Graphics Arts Workshop when she returned to San Francisco. Taking inspiration from Vija Celmins and Robert Bechtle, she continues to explore public spaces in her work, such as a series based on a closed paint store across the street from her house:

"It was such a nowhere place - people would throw garbage over the fence, plants grew up through the asphalt, but around the edge of the space there was still a lot of activity"

Lately, Newton has moved beyond the urban landscape to the American landscape. Inspired by how the works of Thomas Moran, Frederic Church, and Winslow Homer promoted domestic tourism, Newton is working on a series of highway rest stops:

"I am thinking a little bit about [tourism and creating ideas about traveling], a little bit about people's expectations from public spaces, a little bit about the artificiality and standardization of these places that are in the middle of another place."

Watch the Arteaser Calendar for future shows with works by Sarah Newton

Noah Dasho

One of my first fine art purchases was a print by Noah Dasho at the annual Fort Mason Holiday Print Sale. Years later, I met him at the Bay Printmakers Open Studios. We met after work downtown one evening for this Arteaser interview.

Originally from the Bay Area, Noah Dasho began spending his school years in North Carolina with his mother. They lived near a wildlife refuge, which fed Dasho's early interest in birds: 

"When I was probably six years old I wanted to be an ornithologist [...] I had every bird book there was [...] Roger Tory Peterson was someone that made field guides and he painted every single bird there was, and John James Audubon as well, the naturalist. I would just look at the way that they could draw every bird under the sun"

These detailed bird drawings were more akin to Dasho's own creative pursuits, despite his father's preference for practicing music:

"My dad was a musician and he always wanted me to play an instrument, and I just never took up any instruments, but I've drawn since I was little and I guess always kind of considered myself an artist from a young age" 

Dasho continued art into high school, where he was first exposed to printmaking. These early attempts, however, were not encouraging:

"I did a couple lino-cuts in high school art class and absolutely hated them. I just couldn't get what I wanted. [...] I just remember trying to rub a linoleum block with a wooden spoon in high school and being incredibly frustrated [laughing]" 

Dasho returned to the Bay Area for college at UCSC, where he ultimately majored in Art and Economics:

"I've  always done art, but didn't think I would study that in college. I started trying to take art classes and couldn't get into any unless I had that major. Then I [thought], 'I can do two majors in four years.' So, I did it"

Despite his earlier frustrations in the medium, Dasho found himself back in a printmaking class in college. This time, however, he connected with the technique:

"In college I had no interest in photography, so I took the printmaking course because it fulfilled the same elective. Once I started doing it, I just fell in love with it [...] I love detail and I love line. Printmaking just gave a line that I had never seen before, especially etchings"

The process and precision work of printmaking appeals to Dasho. He enjoys a high level of detail and the patterns it can create:

"Whether it was feathers on a bird, I used to meticulously draw every feather - it was sort of the pattern. And lately I've been doing scales on fish and sort of the patterning of those and different things in urban landscapes. I'm really drawn to those kind of details"

Extending the notion of patterns beyond the image, Dasho is interested in the reproduced nature of the print itself. He reflects this by replicating images within a composition:

"Everything starts with line. I'm incredibly interested in pattern as well. Within that I really like that there's a sort of a nod to the fact that you're creating multiples and I like to do small groupings of things [...] like little flocks of birds"

Dasho doesn't confuse detail with realism. Replication is just one of his stylistic traits:

"I like to kind of flatten shapes a little bit and kind of change the perspective in a lot of my prints. I want do something a little bit beyond just straight photographic [images]"

His early stylistic influences came from traditional printmaking artists:

"I think the reason that I got into printmaking was definitely Japanese woodblock artists [...]  it's the composition, the flattening, the styling, and the colors, sort of the scale [...] I love the big sky and the intricate, yet stylized detail"

Dasho has branched out and now takes inspiration from urban graffiti artists like Barry McGee, Andrew Schoultz, and Evan Hecox:

"Currently, I'm extremely into urban art, and I'm into people who have strong line, strong pattern [...] and also their use of color and imagery"

The defiant nature of urban artist is exciting for Dasho, but he is challenged to reconcile his passion for traditional printmaking: 

"I kind of want to get out of that [traditional] box a little bit, but there's something so beautiful and contained that draws you in about printmaking. It's not really something you view from a distance, it's something that you walk up to and inspect, at least for me, and I hope that my audience has that same relationship with it, that they can go in and see the craft and the detail"

Noah will be participating in the Fort Mason Annual Print Sale from December 5-7. He also has a few works on display at the Falkirk Cultural Center through the end of the year.