Mattituck-based painter Anne Sherwood Pundyk’s work is told in a highly recognizable language of intense color and repeating patterns, on unstretched canvases that are often cut and then sewn back together, the threads and seams a part of an unfolding visual story.
Pictured Above: Anne Sherwood Pundyk and curator Rainer Gross at the exhibition, with one of Ms. Pundyk’s paintings at left and the prints from her recent residency at right.
But about a year ago, she decided she needed a new challenge, a new way of telling these stories in a medium outside her comfort zone. She applied for a residency at The Flatbed Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Austin, Texas and drove across half the country in December, purposely getting lost in this new artistic endeavor.
Not long after she came home with her series of 30 prints — 15 of which she’s happy with — her friend, artist and curator Rainer Gross, urged her to show them at The Gallery at Holy Trinity Church in Greenport.
The exhibition, “Getting Lost On Purpose,” on view since March 8, was initially slated to close April 19, but has been extended at least through early May.
Ms. Pundyk will discuss her work there with Mr. Gross and curator Franklin Hill Perrell on Saturday, April 18 at 3:30 p.m.
“They are remarkable, coherent, and also compress everything she’s doing,” said Mr. Gross, and he and Ms. Pundyk showed the exhibition to a reporter from The Beacon this week. “The printing process fuses everything together and makes it very immediate, like a photo.”
“I think what Rainer saw, which is so gratifying for me, is we both love color, and he could see the combinations, and the processes used to layer them, add them and cover part of them,” said Ms. Pundyk.
“You deal with a different way of making things in a print shop, with different materials and different techniques,” she added. “Everything creates a lot of uncertainties. You really open yourself up to experimentation and see where it leads you.When I sent in my application, I said I wanted to bring my painting aesthetic to printmaking, but it’s very different from painting. It’s almost like a different language.”
But new languages, and new ways of telling stories, are a theme that has long echoed through her work, in pieces that weave language into her process that have in the past included an ongoing internal conversation with her grandmother, children’s book illustrator Mary Sherwood Wright.
And the language of printmaking — the inks, stencils, etchings on drypoint plates, alongwith the process of ensuring the correct pressure of each pressing, each roll of the press layered with a new color each day — dovetails nicely with languages she has already developed.
“Circles for me are a symbol for identity and qualities related to wholeness,” she said. “Color is emotion — it’s agency and mood shifts and different aspects of how we see ourselves. The negotiating of our place in the world has to do with this simple configuration — the circle and the space inside and outside of it. It’s a personal symbol for me.”
Ms. Pundyk and her husband, Jeff Pundyk drove their truck to Texas for the residency, staying in an Airbnb next door to her son, who lives in Austin. She’d head off to the studio each day and come home each night to experience Austin, which continues to keep its promise to be weird, with her family.
“We drove there through the deep south, Birmingham and the whole history of the United States passes through your mind,” she said. “On the eastern side of the state, it’s as if the borderline defines where the landscape changes. East Texas is ranches and scrubby, but with incursions of modern technology — warehouses and manufacturing and massive cell phone towers.”
She began photographing those cell towers, creating a library of new iconography to add to her tool kit, with new angles and geometric configurations.
“It was a change in my visual language, but it also brought with it both history and Kandinsky, the great traditions of abstraction, and also the way technology is part of our everyday,” she said. “I wanted to encapsulate, in an understated, subconscious way, the changes we’re going through.”
While many of the artists working in the print shop were focused on more representational work, she was impressed with the friendliness and openness of both the artists and the staff.
“Texas is a warm, friendly place, and the artists were welcoming. I knew I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said. “I had gotten in over my head. Asking for help was a challenge, but they met me more than halfway.”
Master Printer Joshua Orsburn could see what she was trying to do and suggested a whole new approach and materials to use on the press, sharing inks until her new inks arrived.
“Everyone there was from Texas, and my aesthetic was a little different,” she said. “I felt like a little bit of an outsider, being just interested in abstraction and color, but people would come by when I was working and give me props. Austin is a great place of coming together and accepting differences.”
That sense of a community surrounding the presses, and of printmaking’s history as a way of bringing art to the masses, carried through to the community back here at home, where she was gratified to quickly have a place to show her new work.
She also found the printmaking process had changed her painting process.
“I’ve been doing super-clear, pared down paintings,” she said. “I have this confidence in exposing a very clear message, by sorting through that in the printmaking process, I learned how to bring that back to my paintings. It’s been a liberating process, where I can just be more confident in the clarity of what I’m saying.”
She intends to get lost on purpose again, and to continue to develop her printmaking language.
“It’s like that country song,” she said, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?”
“You never could have made this here. You had to go away,” agreed Mr. Gross.
“Getting Lost On Purpose” is currently on view at The Gallery at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, 768 Main Street, Greenport. The Artist Talk will be held on Saturday, April 18 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Here’s More Info.
We will update this post when a closing date for the show is announced.
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