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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, January 25, 2004

Find play of light in printmaker's retrospective

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

 •  'A Backward Glance'

Dodie Warren

10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays

10 to 2 p.m. Saturday

Through Feb. 5

Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani

Community College

734-9375

Dodie Warren's retrospective, "A Backward Glance," is a visual banquet that highlights 35 years of printmaking. The 54 prints in the exhibit incorporate several methods of engraving (mezzotint, drypoint, intaglio and photogravure).

Warren is self-taught. She learned anatomy by drawing pictures of sculptures she found in encyclopedias. Many years later, after discovering a mezzotint in a book of prints from the 18th century, she decided to search for a teacher. "I found out there was no one in Hawai'i who could teach me," Warren says. "So I did some research and found the kind of tools you need, and some rough instructions in a book. But there wasn't much detail, because I think they didn't believe anyone would follow through." She did, however — proceeding through trial and error to teach herself.

The mezzotint process, although laborious, produces the richest blacks and whites achievable in engraving and, as A. Hyatt Mayor writes, "requires the wizardry of a Rembrandt." Ludwig von Siegen, a contemporary of Rembrandt, invented the process in 1642.

Warren's growth and skill in this process are obvious. She literally brings the light out of the darkness in her mezzotints — a light that at times appears divine and ethereal. The added bonus of this retrospective is that we are able to chart her learning curve from her first mezzotints in 1981.

From beginning to end, a mezzotint, if executed properly, can take up to two months to get to the inking/printing stage. First, a copper plate is prepared by making indentations on the surface with a rocker with sharpened teeth. For Warren, this has become a meditative process. She rocks her plates in 36 different directions to achieve greater contrasts of light and dark (chiaroscuro) in the printing stages. Her earlier prints illustrate color values achieved with 20 directions of rocking. Although beautiful and strong, they are not as intensely and luxuriously black or as brightly white as her later prints. A 12-by-18-inch plate now takes Warren approximately 120 hours to rock.

If the plate were printed at this stage, it would be a deeply saturated black. However, after pricking the copper surface, she uses a scraper to burnish down the roughness in areas where she wants lighter values. "I try to establish the lightest lights first," says Warren. "With experience, you can read the plate like a negative. After establishing the light areas, I proof it. Then I start working the other values and go back to make sure the light values are still intact. The plate is inked and wiped like an etching before it is put in a press." Some of her plates are difficult to wipe (for example, if the light areas are surrounded by dark areas), and the process can take up to 1 1/2 hours per print.

Warren's selection of subject matter is an important factor in this time-consuming printing process. Every image has a story of its own. Some images take years to bring to fruition. The mezzotint "Confrontation" is an example.

"When I left Japan, I bought little boxes of candies," Warren says. "After my family ate the candies, the boxes sat around for five years. I knew there was a print there. I was dusting them off one day and I noticed they looked different, more ominous."

In the finished print, a theatrical spotlight shines on empty candy boxes that have encircled one distinctly different box. Here, Warren has created a powerful image from the simplest of things, open to numerous interpretations, and seasoned to perfection with inherent meaning, light and shadow.

Many of the prints in this show are to some degree autobiographical. In her statement, she quotes author Wallace Stegner: "If there is a sense in which every piece of fiction is autobiographical, it is just as true that every autobiography is fiction."

Warren adds: "Much of the artist is revealed in our choice of subject matter. Yet when a viewer examines the work it then becomes a viewer's interpretation, and that forms a new revelation and perhaps a fiction."

She reveals in her selection of subject material some of what is important to her.

Traveling is always a time of special creative activity for Warren. Many prints demonstrate what inspired her initial sketches — on Maui and in Italy, Norway and Japan, as well as at home on O'ahu.

In the mezzotint "Shadow Play," an ordinary dining room chair becomes a graphic symphony of stripes from the diagonal light that beams through the blinds reflecting patterns on a chair and a wall.

Warren hand-colors some of her mezzotints. In one of her favorite images, a reminder of a time when she felt like she was going home, "Ka Ua Kea o Hana (The White Mists of Hana)," she used pastels and added green and red to the black ink. The cross-shaped image is so sumptuous one can almost feel the sweet, soft mists.

The photogravure "Breaking Point" is intentionally hung askew, and curator David Behlke would prefer that viewers refrain from straightening it out.

The plate used in the intaglio print "There was a Courtyard ... " is on display underneath the print. This gives viewers a glimpse of the surface texture she applied to the plate to achieve the end result. There is also a mezzotint, "Self Portrait," depicting the artist's hands preparing a copper plate with a mezzotint rocker.

The intaglio print "Kahana" was juried into a national printmaking show, and "He Malu Ho'olu" was selected as a gift print for the Ho-nolulu Printmakers. The light sifting through the foliage and stones on the lanai in this mezzotint are luminous and vital.

Staircases and window themes run through many of Warren's prints. Her ability to portray multiple reflections in windows and mirrors and to use light to reveal structure is reminiscent of 17th-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.

Warren has been teaching since 1976. Initially, she taught adult watercolor classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. "I got to the point where watercolor lost its challenge," Warren says. Although she was a watercolorist for years, she thinks in black and white. "If I look at a scene, the color is secondary, the structure is first" she says. She decided to switch direction and teach printmaking.

Warren, who has an MFA from the University of Hawai'i, teaches beginning and advanced printmaking classes at the Academy Art Center at Linekona.

If you go to the Farmers' Market at Kapi'olani Community College on a Saturday morning, plan to take a short detour to the Koa Gallery, which opens at 10 a.m. Great art, like great food, is extremely satisfying.