Ann Kipling: Prints

January 18 to March 16, 2003

Organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery.
Curated by Roger Boulet.

Although Ann Kipling’s drawings have been featured in a number of group and solo exhibitions in British Columbia and across Canada, her prints have rarely been exhibited. During the summer of 1997, while going through her prints with curator Roger Boulet in preparation for this exhibition, Ann Kipling’s interest in printmaking, long dormant, was reawakened. The 78 works featured in this exhibition include 57 prints dated between 1958 and 1967 from the Kamloops Art Gallery permanent collection and 21 prints produced during 1999 and 2000.

Kipling’s earliest essays in the print media date from 1958 when she was a student at the Vancouver School of Art (now the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design). She first experimented with woodcut and lithography. In the early 1960s, Kipling purchased a small etching press and taught herself drypoint, etching, and aquatint. This intaglio work seems to have come about as a result of her desire to draw directly onto copper and zinc plates.

Kipling’s working method usually involves completing a drawing or print in one session. The works are never based on preliminary drawings or sketches, but record the artist’s drawing directly onto the plate. In the early years, she took her copper plates out into the landscape and drew her reactions to and visions of the forms before her. Kipling still uses this method of working and avoids work that is not based on direct and intensive observation.

The drypoints done in the sixties were accomplished by Kipling herself working both as artist and printer. She learned and developed her technique as she pulled plates, producing a significant body of graphic works between 1964 and 1967. For the new works, rather than doing the actual printing herself, Kipling used the facilities of a professional print shop, producing and proofing the plates with master printers.