Archipelago Fine Arts, the Island Institute’s art gallery at 386 Main Street in Rockland, is exhibiting two Peaks Island artists: woodcut printmaker Jane Banquer and photographer Victor Romanyshyn. The new show, “Ink & Light,” runs through Jan. 24.
After studying woodcut and relief printing with Leonard Baskin at Smith College, Jane Banquer spent decades working with intaglio methods, especially etching and collograph, before returning to woodcut in 2007 after attending a session at Haystack Mountain School taught by Barbara Putnam.
She now focuses almost exclusively on woodcut prints-a reconnection that has also sparked a return, after many years, to painting.
Using line, shape and contour to define, model, place, and interpret forms through marks on paper and canvas, wood, metal and three-dimensional materials, Banquer makes studies, assembles images, paints and constructs plates for woodcut, etching, dry point, engraving and collagraph prints. “Starting with, but often radically changing these empirical images, it’s the printmaker’s craft that captures my fancy as the medium to present my ideas.”
A painter in his early career, Victor Romanyshyn lived in New York City’s East Village for over 20 years. When he returned home to Peaks Island, he brought that painterly patience into his digital photographs of the natural world surrounding him on the island, as well as into his studio, where-with only the “Rembrandt” lighting from the window-he creates still-life images reminiscent of the Old Masters.
First he paints a painting, and then he assembles a still life in front of it. He waits for the light to move and, when it reaches the perfect illuminations for the composition, he makes the photograph. As Philip Isaacson wrote in the March 8, 2008 Maine Sunday Telegram, “Romanyshyn’s color prints are the product of a painter’s eyes. They achieve formal ideals with painterly grace, and the results are gorgeous.”
A gallery of images is available on the Archipelago website, www.thearchipelago.net. Archipelago Fine Arts is open 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays, and 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Sundays.