Laura Crehuet Berman, a Kansas-City based artist, has been creating prints for almost 30 years. Calling what she does “puzzle-piece printmaking”, Laura produces prints, collages, and drawings and paintings on paper which are known for their captivating and joyful range of colours and use of transparency and layering. Through her abstract and atmospheric use of both colour and shape, her works allude to the geological artefacts they are inspired by; from small hand-held rocks to stunning gems and organic foliage.
Her prints build as families of imagery, with a never-ending variety of playful compositions and combinations. Working from her converted garage studio, most recently, Laura’s work is created using a relief monoprint technique.
Laura describes the way she works as “dynamic and playful”; the images she creates are individual moments that stop to capture one point in time from a continually ongoing process. This is a direct parallel to her influences themselves; “immense geologic wonders, and other-worldly phenomena in outer space–all of which embody and connect interactions of time and space”.
“Colour, light, and luminosity inform my visual choices and I work intuitively with these essentials. Designing, mixing, and documenting every colour I use, my flagship layering process is both precise and exploratory” says Laura. One colour informs the next, naturally creating a family of colours, and one layer of printing informs the next, creating a series of relational shifts in the space of one image.
Her studio is home to a Charles Brand intaglio press and many tables, some of which she inherited from her husband’s former bakery. One area of her studio is mostly used for her collage work, but most of the space is flexible; “I can set up to print large projects, create 20 collages at once, or package and ship work all in the same space, depending on how I set it the workspace”. She uses software and digital tools to archive and build digital templates for her shapes, but the majority of what she does to prepare for printing is done by hand with pencils, scissors, and patience.
Laura is currently working towards larger scales with her prints, collages and paintings. “In this process, my knowledge about and reverence for paper itself has grown immensely,” says the printmaker. She also tells us that she is working on a new sculptural track, in which her imagery is recreated in hand-worked, laminated wooden forms which she paints by hand.
Currently, Laura works with five galleries and a fine-print publisher (Pele Prints in St. Louis, Missouri) and also has a few commercial contracts for reproductions of her work. Over the past few years she has worked on a range of commissions for both private and public collections. Alongside her creative practice, Laura is a Professor at Kansas City Art Institute, where she has taught printmaking and book arts since 2002.
www.lauracrehuetberman.com
@bermanlaura
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