Barbara Ekedahl Printmaking Lincoln VT
Barbara Ekedahl lives and works in the hill town of Lincoln, Vermont. She has drawn and painted all her life and attended Monmouth University as a fine art major. It is in recent years that woodblock printmaking using traditional Japanese tools and methods has become her primary focus. Barbara enjoys life in a rural town and is inspired by the mountains, forests and natural world around her. Moku Hanga is the Japanese term meaning wood print. This method of printing is a complex, multi-step process using simple tools of elegant design and Japanese origin. Carving knives, wooden blocks, rubbing brushes, paper, water-based pigments and rice paste, and a hand-held, natural-fiber printing disk known as a baren are necessary to create a print. Each step, from drawing an image, transferring it to wood, carving the image, applying the colot, rubbing and pressing the paper onto the carved and colored wood block is performed by my hand.
In some of my prints, I’ve combined a love of printmaking with my fascination with maps. Using one block of wood, I hand print a silhouette image using black sumi ink on maps. The maps are archival quality ink-jet reproductions on acid-free paper, selected from my collection of topographic and other types of maps. The prints are open editions as each image takes on a completely different appearance and feeling with its accompanying map background. My subject matter is often derived from landscapes or other images of visual interest. I am inspired by the early Japanese prints of the ukiyo-e style. The Japanese term ukiyo-e translates literally as “pictures of the floating world.” It refers to a Buddhist concept of an illusory or sensory world and the transitory nature of life. I have chosen to stretch and play with that meaning in some of my work, as I print with black Sumi ink on maps of varying kinds. I find the colors and contour lines of topographical and soil maps visually sensual and political maps’ location names intriguing and enticing. It is with this eye and a play on words that I create my “pictures floating on the world.”